this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
403 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
76484 readers
5215 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, AI therapy is more likely to harm their mental health, up to encouraging suicide (as certain cases have already shown).
Over the long term I have significant hopes for AI talk therapy, at least for some uses. Two opportunities stand out that might have potential:
In some cases I think people will talk to a soulless robot more freely than to a human professional.
Machine learning systems are good at pattern recognition and this is one component of diagnosis. This meta analysis found that LLM models performed about as accurately as physicians, with the exception of expert-level specialists. In time I think it’s undeniable that there is potential here.
There's evidence that a lot of suicide hotlines can be just as bad. You hear awful stories all the time of overwhelmed or fed up operators taking it out on the caller. There's some real evil people out there. And not everyone has access to a dedicated therapist who wants to help.
Suicide is big business. There's infrastructure readily available to reap financial rewards from the activity, atleast in the US.
More so from corporate proprietary ones no? At least I hope that's the only cases. The open source ones suggest really useful ways proprietary do not. Now I dont rely on open source AI but they are definitely better
The corporate models are actually much better at it due to having heavy filtering built in. The fact that a model generally encourages self arm is just a lie that you can prove right now by pretending to be suicidal on ChatGPT. You will see it will adamantly push you to seek help.
The filters and safety nets can be bypassed no matter how hard you make them, and it is the reason why we got some unfortunate news.
Real therapy isn’t always better. At least there you can get drugs. But neither are a guarantee to make life better—and for a lot of them, life isn’t going to get better anyway.
Are you comparing a professional to a text generator?
Have you ever had ineffective professional therapy?
Are you still trying to compare medical treatment with generating text?
Compare, as in equal? No. You can’t “game” a person (usually) like you can game an AI.
Now, answer my question
No, comparing as in comparing apples and oranges.
Answer my question, or just admit you refuse to engage in conversation and we can depart
There is no conversation to be had here, because you have no point.
A text generator is not someone you talk to, it's a thing that takes your input and then outputs the text that is most likely relevant to said input.
No reasoning. No knowledge.
Taking the example made in one of the other comments here, you could paint a face to a ball and keep yourself mentally stable on a desert island, but the ball isn't doing anything, there's only you on the island.
Apply that to getting mental help from an LLM and you'll see how creepy it is.
what you are describing is called a Markov chain, not a large language model.
Totally another thing, since we are talking about language here.
But feel free to join the other guy in talking to your screen.
It’s pretty difficult to prove my point when you refuse to have a conversation. What you want is to just get your dopamine by criticizing others instead of allowing them to argue their point.
So you are right, there is no conversation to be had here because you are not willing to engage in a conversation.
I wish you the best in your therapy.
I wish you the best in talking to the calculator.
Real therapy is definitely better than an AI. That said, AIs will never encourage self harm without significant gaming.
AI “therapy” can be very effective without the gaming, but the problem is most people want it to tell them what they want to hear. Real therapy is not “fun” because a therapist will challenge you on your bullshit and not let you shape the conversation.
I find it does a pretty good job with pro and con lists, listing out several options, and taking situations and reframing them. I have found it very useful, but I have learned not to manipulate it or its advice just becomes me convincing myself of a thing.
I agree, and to the comment above you, it's not because it's guaranteed to reduce symptoms. There are many ways that talking with another person is good for us.
The keyword here is "person".