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

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

#81

Post by torginus »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #20

"AI is replacing bartenders as everyone's therapist. On the bright side, the bartenders finally have someone to talk to about losing their jobs." -- Claude

I'm not American, but is talking to bartenders actually a thing? When I go to places like this I always either go with friends/family. There are some smaller pubs where I do know the bartender/pub owner, but it's more of a familiarity/community thing.

I've always assumed that a guy walking into a bar and discussing his intimate life with a person he just met is more of a Hollywood plot hook.

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

#82

Post by komali2 »

tonymet wrote: post #71
komali2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m sincere . And blackmailing people this way is the gross part , not pointing it out

Oh, well, since you're sincere, the answer to your original question, "Does therapy actually work," is, yes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5509639/

You aren't sincere, though, since you followed it up with a clearly uninformed assumption: "Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured." That you're uninformed is obvious: there's myriad papers demonstrating the efficacy of psychotherapy in treating all manner of diseases, furthermore, to say "cured" means you have a fundamentally uninformed understanding of medicine. Nobody that's spent any reasonable amount of time learning about medicine would so flippantly say something vague like "cured." How do you "cure" a limb with peripheral arterial disease? Well, you treat the patient by amputating the limb. Boom, they've been "cured" of PAD! You see, it's absurd.

Based on your site, you seem like a pretty smart guy, in engineering. Maybe when it comes to confidently dismissing entire swaths of knowledge, you should stick to your own field, rather than "sincerely" doubting an entire branch of medicine without even a single paper linked to support your position.

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

#83

Post by kinakomochidayo »

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…

LLMs don’t notice the frown or smile as you talk about sad memories or incidents. They don’t notice the underlying emotions that aren’t explicitly expressed through words. They don’t have the timing of when to ask questions that deepen your experience. They also don’t provide the regulated nervous system when you’re feeling dysregulated.

LLMs are basically glorified CBT machines, but they don’t have the Rogerian presence and therapeutic alliance that good therapists are able to provide, and are more important than the modalities that are used in sessions.

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

#84

Post by tonymet »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #75
tonymet wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sincere . And blackmailing people this way is the gross part , not pointing it out

Not a single person who read this thread (including you) honestly believes you are trying to have a sincere discussion

Certainly I do. The subject is if AI can be better than therapy. My position is : yes, because therapy (as commonly practiced) is terrible, so the bar is low. Also , AI can be a great therapy (in the real sense)

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

#85

Post by tonymet »

komali2 wrote: post #82
tonymet wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sincere . And blackmailing people this way is the gross part , not pointing it out

Oh, well, since you're sincere, the answer to your original question, "Does therapy actually work," is, yes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5509639/ You aren't sincere, though, since you followed it up with a clearly uninformed assumption: "Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured." That you're uninformed is obvious: there's myriad papers demonstrating the efficacy of psychotherapy in treating all mann…

many disorders have cures. “Therapy” is unique in that the cure is more therapy and drugs. Therapy isn’t medicine. It isn’t an empirical practice. A board makes up subjective disorders, practitioners subjectively qualify patients and ply them with drugs. No relation to medicine.

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

#86

Post by jubilanti »

celdon25 wrote: post #68
jubilanti wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost certainly from an online panel survey of people who are paid to take surveys, which is a mini-industry in itself, people try to make a living taking as many as they can for a few cents. The people who fill these out are completely unrepresentative of the general population and quite a few are probably having their openclaw fill it out for them.

Not sure if you saw this, but it says at the footer: > 1.Methodology: The study was carried out in collaboration with IPSOS among 19,000 adults aged 18 to 75 across 18 countries, between 12 January and 16 February 2026. Survey methods: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/survey-methods-ipsos-uk If the Ipsos stock price is any indicator of surveys still being viable in 2026, then I can only wonder what actually motivates comm…

Did you get that link from an LLM? Did you actually read it? That is not the methodology page for this survey. That is a general article on the kinds of survey methods you can contract with Ipsos to run.

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

#87

Post by tonymet »

iammjm wrote: post #77
tonymet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cured would mean you are healed . No more therapeutics , no more abnormalities

I dare you to find a single person without "abnormalities"

Then which ones is therapy aiming to fix?

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

#88

Post by throwup238 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #73
throwup238 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a little both funny and awkward to see all these jokes about Freud while in my particular case "patient was traumatized by dysfunctional family, also patient has incestuous desires" is 100% correct. Also, I suspect that in 5 to 10 years these ideas will go back to mainstream, especially considering the current fad of calling everyone "daddy" - that word is slowly moving from underground gay fetish into mainstrea…

> the current fad of calling everyone "daddy" - that word is slowly moving from underground gay fetish into mainstream, and I assume that it didn't appear out of the blue.

That's been in mainstream straight porn for at least twenty years.

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

#90

Post by celdon25 »

jubilanti wrote: post #86
celdon25 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you saw this, but it says at the footer: > 1.Methodology: The study was carried out in collaboration with IPSOS among 19,000 adults aged 18 to 75 across 18 countries, between 12 January and 16 February 2026. Survey methods: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/survey-methods-ipsos-uk If the Ipsos stock price is any indicator of surveys still being viable in 2026, then I can only wonder what actually motivates comm…

Did you get that link from an LLM? Did you actually read it? That is not the methodology page for this survey. That is a general article on the kinds of survey methods you can contract with Ipsos to run.

No, yes, I know, and it doesn’t affect my point. Thanks for your concern, HN!
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