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More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

axa.com

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Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#41

Post by nineplay »

dvt wrote: post #2

I'm not a psychologist or a mental health professional, but I think that this might serve a similar purpose as journaling. It's obvious that AI can't "fix your problems," but just writing stuff down can help us process.

I was going though a problem I'm having parents - they are aging, decisions need to be made, that sort of stuff. Writing it out, thinking about it, reflecting further - I probably spent at least and hour just typing in my thoughts as they came to me and honestly I often didn't read the AI responses.

All of that got me to realize that the problem wasn't that I wasn't explaining myself well. I kept thinking that if I'd just found the right words they'd change their minds. The process of digging into not just where they are now but who they've always been, how they've always been. I need to accept that and move forward.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#42

Post by tonymet »

Papazsazsa wrote: post #17

If you have baseline epistemic hygiene there's nothing wrong with using an LLM for advice. If you have baseline epistemic hygeine you'd also recognized this as a B2B sales pitch: Axa sell group health, employee-assistance, and corporate wellbeing products.

Fancy way to say conformist ?

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#43

Post by idiotsecant »

ai_critic wrote: post #23

Is anyone actually surprised? The baseline empathy and emotional intelligence of people, both online and offline, has absolutely tanked--I think Covid was the epoch, but arguably going a lot farther back since then. People are just shitty .

Surprised and suspicious. A tiny fraction of LLM queries are what anthropic calls 'affective' queries. Very little LLM traffic is for anything other than factual uses, and of that a vanishingly small fraction is something like psychological advice

https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-people-use-claude-for-sup...

I suspect this company is deliberately using terrible data to drive eyeballs, which, mission accomplished I guess.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#45

Post by fwipsy »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #33

I haven't done it yet due to privacy concerns, but I would totally do it with a private local model that's as intelligent as current frontier models and is not sycophantic and perhaps is finetuned on the psychology literature. My reasoning is that, if therapy is a well-understood science, then I trust a big finetuned LLM more than a run-of-the-mill human therapist. I will not be able to afford a Harvard trained psych…

My experience with therapy has been that it's more of an art than a science. It's hard to say what good therapy even is - different people need different things. I would not want Freud or Jung to be my therapist.

I think your ideal AI therapist doesn't exist and may never exist. Given current models, I have a hard boundary where I will not rely on AIs for therapy or companionship. There are just too many stories of AI psychosis, and it's too easy to see myself becoming dependent on them.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#46

Post by throwup238 »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #33

I haven't done it yet due to privacy concerns, but I would totally do it with a private local model that's as intelligent as current frontier models and is not sycophantic and perhaps is finetuned on the psychology literature. My reasoning is that, if therapy is a well-understood science, then I trust a big finetuned LLM more than a run-of-the-mill human therapist. I will not be able to afford a Harvard trained psych…

> then again I'm not going to be able to afford Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.

Just spin in place chanting “it was my mother’s fault” and you’ll get 99% of the effect.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#47

Post by komali2 »

tonymet wrote: post #37
komali2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Therapy keeps people alive that wouldn't otherwise be, and people coping that wouldn't otherwise be able to. I've noticed that the human tolerance for extreme suffering leads sometimes to binary thinking. "Well they're still going to work even though they're made to piss in bottles, they must be fine with it!" Human experience is a wide array of emotions and states, I don't think we should try to separate into "cured…

The suicidality blackmail

Pretty gross comment. Just say you're cool and awesome cause you don't care about people. Virtue signal and move on, why make try to make a fake discussion?

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#48

Post by amanaplanacanal »

jkubicek wrote: post #28
ai_critic wrote: post #23

Is anyone actually surprised? The baseline empathy and emotional intelligence of people, both online and offline, has absolutely tanked--I think Covid was the epoch, but arguably going a lot farther back since then. People are just shitty .

I’m surprised that 6 out of 10 people even use AI, let alone that many people use it as a therapist.

Yeah. I simply don't believe it. They do describe their methodology at the end of the article. It's a single sentence.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#49

Post by Zealotux »

As much as I can be critical of LLMs I must recognize they help a lot putting a different (and generally healthier) perspective to things, I don't have to book a psychologist and can just "empty my bag".

Some rules I have for myself: limit the chat length, don't go too far down the rabbit hole, put one prompt with as much detail as possible and keep the LLM focused on one specific topic or issue I want to resolve, make sure I ask it to give me a nuanced take and not just validate my opinion.

Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

#50

Post by Steppphennn »

Well it seems obvious that would happen. In fact, I think many more people are using them as doctors. You only get 30mins with a therapist and about 5 minutes in a crowded doctor’s office. It’s so great to go into detail and have the LLM cross reference everything better than using a search engine picking up every single detail.
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