ChatGPTherapy

I have found that LLMs are excellent short term therapists.

Let me be clear: I don’t think that means real therapy is going to be replaced anytime soon. Real therapy is awesome. Human to human connection about your problems is one of the few things that I don’t think AI is going to take over. A lot of the skills in being a therapist are interpersonal and contextual, which are things that AI is quite bad at (so far).

But there’s one thing that AI is able to do today that I think is extremely valuable: listening to you in your own words, without judgement, and providing encouragement.

I think a main function of therapy is having someone to talk to about the things that you don’t want to talk about with your family and friends. Maybe other people are more open than me, but I feel like blasting people with my deepest personal problems makes me less of a good hang. I feel like everybody has stuff that they don’t talk about that they wish they could.

Therapists step in here and say “You can say LITERALLY ANYTHING to me, and it is MY JOB to not be annoyed or judge you at all for any of this. In fact, it is my number one priority to help you out. I’m getting paid to do it.”

I think that this is a massive social good, and therapists deserve a shitton of money for doing what they do (and the profession does pay quite well!).

Recently, I’ve tried out something a little weird: I open an anonymous ChatGPT session, and I just rant about whatever little thing is causing me strife. I don’t know where this training data came from, but it always responds in the most compassionate, most understanding way possible, always making me feel like my problems are valid and that there’s a solution.

The only downside to real therapists is that you can’t text them in the middle of the night and have them immediately ready to help you out. ChatGPT fills that gap pretty darn well!

And yeah, I know that it doesn’t have real empathy for me, and I know that it’s just choosing the next word that makes the most sense, but darn it, it really helps me out!

As much as it’s become a cliche to make a product that is just a wrapper over a vanilla LLM, I think if someone was able to really nail down patient confidentiality they could turn this unexpected benefit of LLMs into something that helps a lot of people. People need support sometimes, and it seems to me like LLMs are willing to provide it ad infinitum!