Comment by ltbarcly3

Some kind of AI should absolutely replace therapists, eventually. It already happened months ago, we need to focus on making it good for individuals and humanity.

In general the patterns of our behavior and communications are not very difficult to diagnose. LLMs are too easy to manipulate and too dependent on random seeds, but they are quite capable of detecting clear patterns of behavior from things like chat logs already.

Human therapists are, in my experience, bad at providing therapy. They are financially dependent on repeat business. Many are very stupid, and many are heavily influenced by pop psychology. They try to force the ways they are coping with their own problems onto their patients to maintain a consistent outlook, even when it is pathological (for example a therapist who is going through a divorce will push their clients into divorce).

Even if they were on average good at their jobs, which they absolutely are not (on average), they are very expensive and inconvenient to work with. The act of honesty bringing up your problems to another human is incredibly hard for most people. There are so many structural problems that mean human therapists are not utilized nearly as often as they should be. Then you remember that even when people seek therapy they often draw a bad card and the therapist they get is absolute trash.

We have a fairly good understanding of how to intervene successfully in a lot of very very common situations. When you compare the success that is possible to the outcomes people get in therapy theres a stark gap.

Instead of trying to avoid the inevitable, we should focus on making sure AI solutions are effective, socially responsible and desireable, private, safe. An ai therapy bot that monitors all your communications and helps you identify and work through your issues will be the the greatest boon to either mental health in history or the most powerful tool of social control ever created, but it is basically already here so we should focus on getting the desired outcome, not helping therapists cling to the idea their jobs are safe.