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.
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.
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!
It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. Definitely agree about talking to an abuser, though.
Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps.
But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.
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.
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?
Counter-point: I often raise the same question of people with human therapists. I do not get strong responses.
The same way you distinguish between feeling like having a problem and actually having a problem.
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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.
It doesn't try to do anything. It doesn't work like that. It regurgitates the most likely tokens found in the training set.
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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!
It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. Definitely agree about talking to an abuser, though.
Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps.
But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.
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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.