Comment by brookst
8 days ago
Exactly. You see this same thing with LLMs as tutors. Why no, Mr. Rothschild, you should not replace your team of SAT tutors for little Melvin III with an LLM.
But for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to human tutors, LLMs are a godsend.
I expect the same is true for therapy.
>You see this same thing with LLMs as tutors. Why no, Mr. Rothschild, you should not replace your team of SAT tutors for little Melvin III with an LLM.
I actually think cheap tutoring is one of the best cases for LLMs. Go look at what Khan academy is doing in this space. So much human potential is wasted because parents can't afford to get their kids the help they need with school. A properly constrained LLM would be always available to nudge the student in the right direction, and identify areas of weakness.
Seriously, if for no other reason than you can ask the LLM to clarify its initial response.
I had difficulty with math as a kid and well into college (ironic given my profession), and one of the big issues was the examples always skip some steps, often multiple steps. I lost countless hours staring blankly at examples, referencing lecture notes that weren't relevant, googling for help that at best partially answered my specific question, sometimes never getting the answer in time and just accepting that I'd get that one wrong on the homework.
An LLM, if it provides accurate responses (big "IF"), would have saved me tons of time. Similarly today, for generic coding questions I can have it generate examples specific to my problem, instead of having to piece solutions together from generic documentation.
Except LLMs that tell the student wrong answers, or the person needing therapy to kill themselves.
Tutors often tell students the wrong answer too!
Right instead of sending them humans let's send them machines let's see what the outcome will be. Dehumanizing everything just because one is a tech enthusiast that's the future you want? Let's just provide free chatgpt for traumatized palestinians so we can sleep well ourselfs
You seem to have missed this in the comment to which you're replying "...for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to human tutors, LLMs are a godsend." And WTF are you mentioning "palestinians"?
"...for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to fresh food, cheap disastrously unhealthy food is a godsend."
"...for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to decent housing, unmaintained dangerous apartment buildings are a godsend."
Why is it ok to expect poor people to be endangered and suffer through indignity just for the "crime" of being poor?
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One of my friends is too economically weighed down to afford therapy at the moment.
I’ve helped pay for a few appointments for her, but she says that ChatGPT can also provide a little validation in the mean time.
If used sparingly I can see the point, but the problems start when the sycophantic machine will feed whatever unhealthy behaviors or delusions you might have, which is how some of the people out there that'd need a proper diagnosis and medication instead start believing that they’re omnipotent or that the government is out to get them, or that they somehow know all the secrets of the universe.
For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.
>For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.
It's not that far from the truth. Both Nvidia and AMD have remunerative relationships with game and engine developers to optimise games for their hardware and showcase the latest features. We didn't get raytraced versions of Portal and Quake because the developers thought it would be fun, we got them because money changed hands. There's a very fuzzy boundary between a "commercial partnership" and what most people might consider bribery.
Well, it's not really conspiratorial. Hardware vendors adding new features to promote the sale of new stuff is the first half of their business model.
Bribery isn't really needed. Working with their industry contacts to make demos to promote their new features is the second half of the business model.
No need. Now I have four 4090s and no time to play games :(
> Why no, Mr. Rothschild, you should not replace your team of SAT tutors for little Melvin III with an LLM.
To be frank - as someone who did not have a SAT tutor, and coming from a culture where no one did and all got very good/excellent SAT scores: No one really needs a SAT tutor. They don't provide more value then good SAT prep books. I can totally see a good LLM be better than 90% of SAT tutors out there.