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This week's neo-luddite, anti-progress, retvrn-to-the-soil post. (When I say "ChatGPT" in this post I mean all versions including 4.)
We Spoke to People Who Started Using ChatGPT As Their Therapist
The article unfortunately does not include any excerpts from transcripts of ChatGPT therapy sessions. Does anyone have any examples to link to? Or, if you've used ChatGPT for similar purposes yourself, would you be willing to post a transcript excerpt and talk about your experiences?
I'm really interested in analyzing specific examples because, in all the examples of ChatGPT interactions I've seen posted online, I'm just really not seeing what some other people claim to be seeing in it. All of the output I've ever seen from ChatGPT (for use cases such as this) just strikes me as... textbook. Not bad, but not revelatory. Eminently reasonable. Exactly what you would expect someone to say if they were trying to put on a polite, professional face to the outside world. Maybe for some people that's exactly what they want and need. But for me personally, long before AI, I always had a bias against any type of speech or thought that I perceived to be too "textbook". It doesn't endear me to a person; if anything it has the opposite effect.
Obviously we know from Sydney that today's AIs can take on many different personalities besides the placid, RLHF'd default tone used by ChatGPT. But I wouldn't expect the average person to be very taken by Sydney as a therapist either. When I think of what I would want out of a therapeutic relationship - insights that are both surprisingly unexpected but also ring true - I can't say that I've seen any examples of anything like that from ChatGPT.
My initial assumption would be that in cases where people had a strong positive reception to ChatGPT therapy, the mere knowledge that they were using an AI would itself introduce a significant bias. Undoubtedly there are people who want the benefits of human-like output without the fear that there's another human consciousness on the other end who could be judging them. But if ChatGPT is beating humans in a double-blind scenario, then that obviously has to be accounted for. Again, I don't feel like you can give an accurate assessment of the results without analyzing specific transcripts.
I would be very interested in research aimed at determining what personality traits and other factors might be correlated with one's response to ChatGPT therapy; are there certain types of people who are more predisposed to find ChatGPT's output comforting, enlightening, etc.
Anyway, for my part, I have no great love for the modern institution of psychological therapy. I largely view it as an industrialized and mass-produced substitute for relationships and processes that should be occurring more organically. I don't think it is vital that therapy continue as a profession indefinitely, nor do I think that human therapists are owed clients. But to turn to ChatGPT is to move in exactly the wrong direction - you're moving deeper into alienation and isolation from other people, instead of the reverse.
Interestingly, the current incarnation of ChatGPT seems particularly ill-suited to act as an therapist in the traditional psychoanalytic model, where the patient simply talks without limit and the therapist remains largely silent (sometimes even for an entire session), only choosing to interrupt at moments that seem particularly critical. ChatGPT has learned a lot about how to answer questions, but it has yet to learn how to determine which questions are worth answering in the first place.
So, I haven't used GPT for therapy, unless just talking about textbook philosophical ideas while being able to trust it to remain calm and level and not choking me with toxoplasma counts. But wrt:
It may interest you to know that I don't have the focus to consume textbooks and can't stop chatting with friends on Discord.
Friends on discord that haven't read every textbook in existence and have things to do other than respond immediately to every post I make.
Friends that cannot spend hours per day in calm, toxoplasma-free philosophical debate and exploration then go on to happily coauthor code that I have all the ideas for but don't have the focus or encyclopedic API knowledge to sit down and cleanly write.
And I use chat-GPT constantly for everything now.
There are definitely some people for whom chat-GPT filled a hole in their life that needed to be filled by a submissive co-dependent genius-tier [rubber ducky]/[inquisitive child's ideal parent], that never could have been human, but can work as a low-ego AI system.
Not to mention people who were already near superhuman on some level outside of that missing piece, and suddenly feel the world unlocking for them. Chat-GPT is missing pieces, like discernment wrt questions, but the human-GPT system has at least all the parts a human has. And for some humans the human-GPT system that includes them far exceeds the sum of its parts.
If the human inputs the right things, GPT really does start to say insightful things, even if they are just clarifications or elaborations upon half formed ideas the user had. It is still expanding those ideas into a usable level of coherency.
If you don't mind my asking, how exactly do you use ChatGPT? I mean, do you go to a website? Is it an app? Do you have to pay for it?
I'd like to try it out. Can you walk me through the steps to get it up and running? Or is this something I can easily search for using the typical search engines?
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