Including someone just yesterday who said they’ve STOPPED SEEING THEIR PSYCHOLOGIST and are ONLY USING CHATGPT for therapy now.
This shit is genuinely dangerous. “AI” therapy got me feeling like bro fr.
Deteriorating material conditions + expensive mental healthcare options + LLMs that recommend tall bridges to suicidal people, what a fucking great recipe
That’s without even getting into the privacy concerns of telling your deepest feelings and secrets to a fucking chatbot that literally builds a profile on you. Someone else said to me recently that they basically use chatgpt to journal so it knows everything about them and their friends and god knows what else. So yeh, take comfort in the fact that even if you’ve never interacted with this dogshit, it could probably still have a deep profile on you because one of your dumbass friends decided to use it as a diary because LLMs just agree with everything you say and are very validating.
I’ve never had a therapist that did anything more than listen and give advice that I could have figured out myself, so I’m not really surprised that ChatGPT is a suitable replacement.
To me, therapy only acts as a necessary prerequisite to receive the medication that actually helps me because the neoliberal order thinks that therapy is a silver bullet to all the world’s ills, like it’s some magical Harry Potter spell.
And most of people’s problems are caused by material conditions that no amount of therapy could ever fix.
1000%, I think therapy is being leaned on way too much by way too many people because of innate issues in our society.
That being said, a chatbot that tells suicidal people where the nearest tall bridges are is a troubling development in the over-therapisation of our individualist society.
Advice is life coaching, therapy is a lot more involved. A therapist can do both but it just depends on what your needs are. Either way, there’s a lot of class conscious ones out there that can help people navigate the capitalist wasteland. AI won’t ever do that and it can’t replicate human connection.
And if you could have figured it out on your own, then why did it take a therapist for you to get there? Maybe I’m reading too much into your phrasing.
‘Look at these sickos paying for bus fares when I simply could have walked 30km round trips on a workday’
"Okay, but did you walk that 30km round trip?’
‘No, I rode a bike’
I really do think that even if all they do is get you to the same place faster, that is significantly valuable.