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Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

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Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#31

Post by Aeolun »

ianbicking wrote: post #26
kmnc wrote: post #13

I would be interested in retention stats for these companionship chatbots. The novelty factor is powerful and addictive, but it fades fast. There is a reason all of these bots gamify everything. The most concerning thing is all these bots are already trying to be as addictive as possible. They are built to exploit the users loneliness. They don’t cause it, they devour it.

I'm a little confused why there aren't better, non-exploitative chatbots. There's not a big technical moat here. Seems like anyone could build a modest business with a better chatbot, built for conversation and companionship instead of the purely utilitarian veneer of chatgpt or Gemini (Claude natively gets pretty close without special prompting). If you can make an ok profit you don't need to exploit folks, and in s…

I tried making one, but it’s hard to get it to feel natural enough. For me anyway, if you are already looking for a virtual therapist it might be fine.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#32

Post by Aeolun »

whyenot wrote: post #30
kianN wrote: post #9

A good heuristic test of correlation vs causation in headlines: flip the dependent and independent variable and see which explanation sounds more reasonable. Heavy llm chat usage leads to loneliness | or | Loneliness leads to heavy chat usage. To my eye the second seems far more likely than the first.

Correlation vs. causation is addressed in the article: Note that these studies aren’t suggesting that heavy ChatGPT usage directly causes loneliness. Rather, it suggests that lonely people are more likely to seek emotional bonds with bots — just as an earlier generation of research suggested that lonelier people spend more time on social media. My heuristic for HN is that when commenters focus on the headline, they a…

I started reading the article, but I didn’t get far enough into it before bouncing due to this disclaimer being too far down.

It also seems like the disclaimer directly contradicts the title, so I don’t think we should blame readers for that.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#33

Post by dbtc »

xoz123 wrote: post #21
drooby wrote: post #2

I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ and often uses language far better than I ever could to help uncover the thoughts and feelings I’m processing. Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself relieves a…

I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotio…

I think there is some danger of becoming a forever-child to this virtual parent, but overall it sounds positive.

I'm hesitant still with spilling any secrets into openAI's servers.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#35

Post by diffxx »

kianN wrote: post #9

A good heuristic test of correlation vs causation in headlines: flip the dependent and independent variable and see which explanation sounds more reasonable. Heavy llm chat usage leads to loneliness | or | Loneliness leads to heavy chat usage. To my eye the second seems far more likely than the first.

I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question. Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up. The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident that in the long run, they are far more likely to increase feelings of loneliness than reduce them.

For me, the only thing that can reduce loneliness is conversation with another conscious entity. Many, if not most, people are barely conscious so this is hard to find in the physical world. But I don't believe llms are conscious, so for me they are a complete dead end for reducing loneliness whatever other virtues the may have.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#36

Post by p3rls »

drooby wrote: post #2

I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ and often uses language far better than I ever could to help uncover the thoughts and feelings I’m processing. Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself relieves a…

Can you depersonalize a few sentences exchange between you and share? I'm curious to see and describing it doesn't really do it justice especially if you're coming to this doubtful about AI

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#37

Post by lukev »

kianN wrote: post #9

A good heuristic test of correlation vs causation in headlines: flip the dependent and independent variable and see which explanation sounds more reasonable. Heavy llm chat usage leads to loneliness | or | Loneliness leads to heavy chat usage. To my eye the second seems far more likely than the first.

Many (if not most) human dynamics do not have a single direction of causality.

The whole premise of cognitive behavioral therapy is that human psychology can be described as nested feedback loops between behavior, emotion, and cognition.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#38

Post by danpalmer »

xoz123 wrote: post #21
drooby wrote: post #2

I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ and often uses language far better than I ever could to help uncover the thoughts and feelings I’m processing. Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself relieves a…

I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotio…

I'm glad it's helping you, and there's no shame in it, but to anyone else, please, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Support is available, in many cases for free and with urgent response if necessary.

LLMs are an echo chamber. They reflect back what we put into them, both in training, and in usage. This can certainly be useful for working through problems, but they can also amplify and reinforce harmful patterns of thought.

If you're spiralling downwards, the worst thing is for an LLM to echo that accelerate the spiral. There's no evidence (only anecdotes) to suggest that LLMs are able to prevent that spiralling in a way that a mental health professional is trained to do.

Re: Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization

#39

Post by m3kw9 »

levocardia wrote: post #19
drooby wrote: post #2

I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ and often uses language far better than I ever could to help uncover the thoughts and feelings I’m processing. Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself relieves a…

I'm very worried that LLMs-as-therapists will wind up falling victim to the same fate as e-cigarettes. An LLM therapist is ~100x cheaper than a real therapist, and similarly more available on demand (in the same way that ecigs were probably a few orders of magnitude safer, in terms of long-term health effects, vs. traditional cigarettes). BUT there is also a gold rush temptation for companies to hack together GPT4 +…

If LLM continues to get better, prompts become less important. You just say you feel depressed and it will know to talk like a therapist by default and likely be better. E-cigs never evolve that rapidly, as an analogy
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