Comment by josephg

> I'd love to hear the preferences of people here who have both been to therapy and talked to an LLM about their frustrations and how those experiences stack up.

I've spent years on and off talking to some incredible therapists. And I've had some pretty useless therapists too. I've also talked to chatgpt about my issues for about 3 hours in total.

In my opinon, ChatGPT is somewhere in the middle between a great and a useless therapist. Its nowhere near as good as some of the incredible therapists I’ve had. But I’ve still had some really productive therapy conversations with chatgpt. Not enough to replace my therapist - but it works in a pinch. It helps that I don’t have to book in advance or pay. In a crisis, ChatGPT is right there.

With Chatgpt, the big caveat is that you get what you prompt. It has all the knowledge it needs, but it doesn’t have good instincts for what comes next in a therapy conversation. When it’s not sure, it often defaults to affirmation, which often isn’t helpful or constructive. I find I kind of have to ride it a bit. I say things like “stop affirming me. Ask more challenging questions.” Or “I’m not ready to move on from this. Can you reflect back what you heard me say?”. Or “please use the IFS technique to guide this conversation.”

With ChatGPT, you get out what you put in. Most people have probably never had a good therapist. They’re far more rare than they should be. But unfortunately that also means most people probably don’t know how to prompt chatgpt to be useful either. I think there would be massive value in a better finetune here to get chatgpt to act more like the best therapists I know.

I’d share my chatgpt sessions but they’re obviously quite personal. I add comments to guide ChatGPT’s responses about every 3-4 messages. When I do that, I find it’s quite useful. Much more useful than some paid human therapy sessions. But my great therapist? I don't need to prompt her at all. Its the other way around.