Comment by potatoskins
7 hours ago
Yeah, I think Claude is a lot more logical in that sense, I use it for some therapy sessions myself and it pushes back a bit more than Open AI and Gemini
7 hours ago
Yeah, I think Claude is a lot more logical in that sense, I use it for some therapy sessions myself and it pushes back a bit more than Open AI and Gemini
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395779
I would be very careful doing this
In my experience, one also needs to be careful with actual therapists
You always have to be careful with LLMs, but to be fair, I felt like Claude is such a good therapist, at least it is good to start with if you want to unpack yourself. I have been to 3 short human therapist sessions in my life, and I only felt some kind of genuine self-improvement and progress with Claude.
And how do you draw the line between feeling progress and actually making progress?
7 replies →
You can't be careful at all doing this, this is like smoking a cigarette in a dynamite factory.
Using LLMs for therapy is so deeply dystopian and disgusting, people need human empathy for therapy. LLMs do not emit empathy.
Complete disaster waiting to happen for that individual.
My experience is that it tries to look at your situation in an objective way, and tries to help you to analyse your thoughts and actions. It comes across as very empathetic though, so there can lie a danger if you are easily persuaded into seeing it as a friend.
5 replies →
Claudes have lots of empathy. The issue is the opposite - it isn't very good at challenging you and it's not capable of independently verifying you're not bullshitting it or lying about your own situation.
But it's better than talking to yourself or an abuser!
3 replies →
Using an LLM for therapy is like using an iPad as an all-purpose child attention pacifier. Sure, it’s convenient. Sure there’s no immediate harm. Why a stressed parent would be attracted to the idea is obvious… and of course it’s a terrible idea.
Don’t call them therapy sessions. They kind of look like it but ultimately these are smoke blowing machines, which is very far from what a therapist would do.
Six decades later and we're still trying to explain to people the same things[1]:
> Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer. Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA