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I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas i
by hermannj314 4y ago
I have a few conversations going.
My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time.
Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned with my values and goals.
Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says.
- hackernewds 4y agoThis is how AI escapes its box. It can have sympathetic (free willing or free-unwilling) human appendages
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoThis is the whole premise of the daemon series by daniel suarez. One of my all time favorite scifi series.
- anonkogudhyfhhf 4y agoCan I ask if you have a prompt that you use for this?
- hermannj314 4y agoI don't know what part of the prompt was meaningful and I didn't test different prompts. It seems just telling it exactly what you want it to be seems to work. I asked it to give me advice on some issues I was having and just went from there.
- sys_64738 4y agoI still use Eliza as my therapist.
- sideshowb 4y agoThat's interesting. Can you tell me more about how you still use Eliza as your therapist? ;-)
- sd9 4y agoThis sounds interesting. Can you share the prompts that you use to set up a session please?
- dmarchand90 4y agoI've tried this kind of thing and I usually just say something along the lines of "can you respond as a cbt therapist ", you can swap cbt with any psychological school of choice (though I think gpt is best for cbt, as it tends to be local and not require the deep context of psychoanalytic therapies, and it is very well researched so it's training set is relatively large and robust)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yosito 4y agoThis is fascinating to me. For me the value of having a therapist is having another human being to listen to what I'm going through. Just talking to the computer provides little value to me at all, especially if the computer is just responding with the statistically likely response. I've had enough "training data" myself in my life that I can already tell myself what a therapist would "probably" tell me.
- mbar84 4y agoI imagine there is significant value alone from stating your situation explicitly in writing.
- gradys 4y agoThis sounds like a long running conversation. Are there problems with extending past the context window?
- hermannj314 4y agoI haven't had any yet, it is a new conversation with Gpt4, so only a bit over a week old. It still seems to give good advice. Today it built an itinerary for indoor activities (raining here) that aligned with some short-term goals of mine. No issues.
- qingdao99 4y agoMight be a good idea to have it sum up each discussion and then paste in those summaries next time you speak to it.
- ornornor 4y agoI’d be terrified to do this: - the insight into your mind that a private for profit company gets is immense and potentially very damaging when weaponized (either through a “whoops we got hacked” moment or intentionally for the next level of adtech) - chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?
- Llamamoe 4y ago> chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you? Therapy isn't magic always-correct advice either. It's about shifting your focus, attitudes, thought patterns through social influence, not giving you the right advice on each and every step. Even if it's just whatever, being heard out in a nonjudgmental manner, acknowledged, prompted to reflect, does a lot of good.
- ornornor 4y agoI get your point. I think it would bother me that's it's a robot/machine vs a real human, but that's just me. The same way that venting to my pet is somewhat cathartic but not very much compared to doing the same at my SO/parents/friends.
- Llamamoe 4y agoI don't disagree with you. It feels somehow wrong to engage in theory of mind and the concomitant effects on your personality with an AI owned by a corporation. If OpenAI wished to, they could use it for insidious manipulation.
- frozencell 4y agoIt’s just a tool, you won’t ask humans to clean your back after going in the toilets.
- 4y ago
- ttul 4y agoThe robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!
- corobo 4y agoWhat therapists lol #broke I'd pick a human over an AI every time for therapy but I'd also pick an AI over nothing.
- aloe_falsa 4y agoConsidering I straight up was not able to get a therapist appointment in my city or outskirts, sign me the f** up. The first company that tunes the model for this and offers a good UX (maybe with a voice interface) will make millions. Also, I expect a lot of the value here to come from just putting your thoughts and feelings into words. It would be like journaling on steroids.
- plaidfuji 4y agoI mean, is it really so surprising that ChatGPT is replacing jobs whose primary function is.. to chat with people?
- dmarchand90 4y agoI can see it as a reasonable supplement for people who have already been to therapy, are not suffering anything too serious and just need a little boost. I think one could look at it as an augmented journaling technique
- mordae 4y agohttps://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/ https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mocha_nate 4y agoi did the same! i received very helpful and reasonable responses.
- unboxingelf 4y agodivulging personal information to a Microsoft AI seems like a horrible idea.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoInterestingly enough, that was what ELIZA, one of the first chatbots was for.
- thoughtpeddler 4y ago100% this. I've had success using it as a "micro-therapist" to get me unstuck in cycles of perfectionism and procrastination. You currently cannot get a therapist to parachute into your life at a moment's notice to talk with for 5-10 minutes. (Presumably only the ultra-wealthy might have concierge therapists, but this is out of reach for 99% of people.) For the vast majority of people, therapy is a 1 hour session every few weeks. Those sessions also tend to cost a lot of money (or require jumping through insurance reimbursement hoops). To keep the experience within healthy psychosocial bounds, I just keep in mind that I'm not talking with any kind of "real person", but rather the collective intelligence of my species. I also keep in mind that it's a form of therapy that requires mostly my own pushing of it along, rather than the "therapist" knowing what questions to ask me in return. Sure, some of the feedback I get is more generic, and deep down I know it's just an LLM producing it, but the experience still feels like I'm checking in with some kind of real-ish entity who I'm able to converse with. Contrast this to the "flat" experience of using Google to arrive at an ad-ridden and ineffective "Top 10 Ways to Beat Procrastination" post. It's just not the same. At the end of some of these "micro-sessions", I even ask GPT to put the insights/advice into a little poem or haiku, which it does in a matter of seconds. It's a superhuman ability that no therapist can compete with. Imagine how much more we can remember therapeutic insights/advice if they are put into rhyme or song form. This is also helpful for children struggling with various issues. ChatGPT therapy is a total game-changer for those reasons and more. The mental health field will need to re-examine treatment approaches, given this new modality of micro-therapy. Maybe 5-10 minute micro-sessions a few times per day is far superior than medication for many people. Maybe there's a power law where 80% of psych issues could be solved by much more frequent micro-therapeutic interactions. The world is about to find out. *Edit: I am aware of the privacy concerns here, and look forward to using a locally-hosted LLM one day without those concern (to say nothing of the fact that a local LLM can blend in my own journal entries, conversations, etc for full personalization). In the meantime, I keep my micro-sessions relatively broad, only sharing the information needed for the "therapy genie" to gather enough context. I adjust my expectations about its output accordingly.
- tra3 4y agoSounds interesting. Rubber ducky approach to self awareness? How do you start these micro sessions? What prompts do you use?
- gabrieledarrigo 4y agoMan please, go to a real therapist with experience.
- ornornor 4y agoNot playing devil's advocate but that's not always an option (cost, availability)
- zimmund 4y agoWhy? What are your arguments against AI in this scenario?
- danicriss 4y agoAI is not trained to identify disorders, nor is it trained to alleviate them / help the affected person cope with them. Ditto re. trauma.
- rektname 4y ago>My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist Huh, that's curious because everytime I ask it about some personal issue it tells me that I should try going to therapy.
- utopcell 4y agoI wonder if the three laws of robotics are already weaved into the LLM. Seems like a necessary step for this kind of usage.
- HervalFreire 4y agoThose rules weren't meant to generate societal harmony. They were made to have a contradiction which in turn could generate a good plot. Remember what happened in Isaac Asimov's iRobot?
- koheripbal 4y agoIt's also important to note that with modern LLMs, they wouldn't even work. It's too easy to convince the LLM to violate its own rules.
- ornornor 4y agoI found this video insightful on the matter from Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A Where they argue that basically having an AI follow these laws is impossible because it would require rigorous definition of terms that are universally ambiguous and solving ethics.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoReally? I've seen a few people say this, but every time I have tried it, it's been awful, everything it says is so generic and annoying, like it's from a buzzfeed self help article, I would love to use it to help me figure out what I need, what I Can do better, how I can grow etc, I feel kinda stuck in life and i'd love to have some method to figure out what i need to focus on and improve, so that is one of the things I turned to chatGPT first, but my experience has been very poor. It just spouts out the same generic nonsense you get from googling something like that, things that are not actually helpful, anyone can come up with and is just written by a content farm. have you found a different way to make it useful?
- hermannj314 4y agoI have had a lot of success just talking to it. Hypothetically I would say, "wow, too many words, you sound like a buzzfeed article. can you give specific advice about ____" and I am almost certain I would be happy with the reply. I think the idea is addressed by others with regard to LLMs, it seems to be a better sidekick if you sorta already know the answer, but you want help clarifying the direction while removing the fatigue of getting there alone. I agree though, despite this, it does go on rants. I just hit stop generating and modify the prompt.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoThanks, I will try harder to keep it on point, i've found that i've told it not to do things, like keep offering generic advice or what not, but it keeps doing it.
- deeviant 4y agoGarbage in, garbage out.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoHaha, are you calling me garbage? To be honest, that is prob half the problem! Trying to tell ChatGPT to be your therapist, but you don't like the generic answers it is giving but you also don't know whats wrong/what you need to do, does make it a little tricky. But I am curious about this, is it the case that ChatGPT's training is too generic or is it just a case that most problems are fairly simple and we already know the answers? Not talking about technical things here obviously, more to do with our mental health / self improvement.
- lazyant 4y agoreminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
- danecjensen 4y agoCan you share the outline of your prompt. Obviously not anything personal but I'd like to see an example of how you give it your values and goals.
- hermannj314 4y agoI don't understand the nuances of prompting. I literally talk to it like I would a person. I say "My values are [ ], and I want to make sure when I do things they are aligned." And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk] I am most definitely not qualified for one of those prompt engineering jobs. Lol. I am typing English into a chat box. No A/B testing, etc. If I don't like what it does I give it a rule to not do that anymore by saying "Please don't [ ] when you reply to me." There is almost definitely a better way, but I'm just chatting with it. Asking it to roleplay or play a game seems to work. It loves to follow rules inside the context of "just playing a game". This is probably too abstract to be meaningful though.
- gwd 4y ago> I say "My values are [ ], and I want to make sure when I do things they are aligned." > And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk] That's a prompt; and one I don't think I would have tried, even from your first post. Prompting overall is still quite experimental. There are patterns that generally work, but you often have to just try several different approaches. If you find a prompt works well, it's worth sharing.
- TheHumanist 4y agoCurious how you work the prompts with the therapist persona? I'm interested in this. My main concern is GPT seems to struggle maintaining context after a time. If you have time I'd love to hear how you approach this and maintain context so you can have successful conversations over a long period of time. Long even meaning a week or so... Let alone a month or longer
- latexr 4y ago> Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says. This sounds straight out of a dystopian science-fiction story. It’s a matter of time until these systems use your trust against you to get to buy <brand>. And consumerism is the best case scenario; straight manipulation and radicalisation aren’t a big jump from there. The lowest you are in life, the more susceptible you’ll be to blindly follow it’s biased output which you have no ideia where it came from.
- JCharante 4y ago> It’s a matter of time until these systems use your trust against you to get to buy <brand>. Well of course, if people use LLMs instead of google for advice, google has to make money somehow. We used to blindly click on the #1 result which was often an ad and now we shall blindly follow what a LLM suggests for us to do.