AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai-therapy-bots-fuel-delusions-and-give-dangerous-advice-stanford-study-finds/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

242 150 1 year ago

I am bipolar and I help run a group. We lost some people to chatbots already that either fueled a manic or a depressive episode.

sherdil2022• 1 year ago

Lost as in ‘not meeting anymore since they are using chatbots instead’ or ‘took their lives’?

BoredPositron2• 1 year ago

Both but it's mostly not the therapy chatbots or normal "chatgpt" those are worse enough. It's these dumbass ai girlfriend/boyfriend bots that run on uncensored small models. They get unhinged really fast.

bravesoul2• 1 year ago

That level of anecdata makes me think this is a huge problem when scaled to the whole world.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

This matches what several mental health professionals I know have reported - AI chatbots tend to validate rather than appropriately challenge potentially harmful thought patterns during mood episodes.

joules77• 1 year ago

It's a bit like talking about the quality of pastoral care you get at Church. You can get a wide spectrum of results.

Worth pointing out such systems have survived a long long time since access to it is free irrespective of the quality.

mlinhares3• 1 year ago

You'll never get the attention of your priest at the same level as a chatbot. Not even close, this is a whole new universe.

mathiaspoint• 1 year ago

I'd argue chatbots give zero actual attention since they're not human (other than in the irrelevant technical sense.) Saying they can is a bit like saying a character in a book or an imaginary friend can.

It will probably take a few years for the general public to fully appreciate what that means.

djtango2• 1 year ago

Assuming we are comparing ChatGPT to an in person therapist, there's a whole universe of extra signals ChatGPT is not privy to. Tone of voice, cadence of speech, time to think, reformulated responses, body language.

These are all CRUCIAL data points that trained professionals also take cues from. An AI can also be trained on these but I don't think we're close to that yet AFAIK as an outsider.

People in need of therapy could (and probably are) unreliable narrators and a therapist's job is to manage long range context and specialist training to manage that.

interestica• 1 year ago

ConfessionGPT?

AdieuToLogic7• 1 year ago

It's a bit like talking about the quality of pastoral care you get at Church.

No, no it isn't.

Whatever you think about the role of pastor (or any other therapy-related profession), they are humans which possess intrinsic aptitudes a statistical text (token) generator simply does not have.

ta86457• 1 year ago

A human may also possess malevolent tendencies that a silicon intelligence lacks. The question is not if they are equals, the question is if their differences matter to the endeavour of therapy. Maybe a human's superior hand-eye coordination matters, maybe it doesn't. Maybe a silicon agent's superior memory recall matters, maybe it doesn't. And so on.

jwe2• 1 year ago

Not really. A pastor is hardly a trained mental health professional.

adamgordonbell• 1 year ago

The study coauthor actually seems positive on their potential:

'LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be.'

And they also mention a previous paper that found high levels of engagement from patients.

So, they have potential but currently are giving dangerous advice. It sounds like they are saying a fine tuned therapist model is needed because 'you are a great therapist' prompt, just gives you something that vaguely sounds like a therapist to an outsider.

Sounds like an opportunity honestly.

Would people value a properly trained therapist enough to pay for it over an existing chatgpt subscription?

AstralStorm2• 1 year ago

What it we gave therapists the same interface as ChatGPT?

Mechanical Turk anyone?

Paracompact• 1 year ago

I expect any LLM, even a fine-tuned one, is going to run into the problem of user-selected conversations that drift ever further away from whatever discourse the original LLM deployers consider appropriate.

Actual therapy requires more unsafe topics than regular talk. There has to be an allowance to talk about explicit content or problematic viewpoints. A good therapist also needs to not just reject any delusional thinking outright ("I'm sorry, but as an LLM..."), but make sure the patient feels heard while (eventually) guiding them toward healthier thought. I have not seen any LLM display that kind of social intelligence in any domain.

apical_dendrite2• 1 year ago

High levels of engagement aren't necessarily a good thing.

One problem is that the advice is dangerous, but there's an entirely different problem, which is the LLM becoming a crutch that the person relies on because it will always tell them what they want to hear.

Most people who call suicide hotlines aren't actually suicidal - they're just lonely or sad and want someone to talk to. The person who answers the phone will talk to them for awhile and validate their feelings, but after a little while they'll politely end the call. The issue is partly that people will monopolize a limited resource, but even if there were an unlimited number of people to answer the phone, it would be fundamentally unhealthy for someone to spend hours a day having someone validate their feelings. It very quickly turns into dependency and it keeps that person in a place where they aren't actually figuring out how to deal with these emotions themselves.

qgin• 1 year ago

Benchmarking LLMs on this is an important thing to do. There is a huge potential positive effect of psychotherapy being always-available to every human rather than just for wealthy people once a week. But to get there we need to know the rate of adverse events compared to human therapists (which isn’t zero either).

m30476• 1 year ago

It was put forward in 1960s (maybe? Robert Anton Wilson? and for parallel purposes Philip K Dick's percept / concept feedback cycle) science fiction, and having therefore casually looked for phenomena when support / disprove this hypothesis over the intervening years: that people in power necessarily become functionally psychotic because people will self-select to be around them as a self-preserving / promoting opportunity (sycophants) who cannot help but filter shared observations through their own biases, this is profoundly unsurprising to me.

If you choose to believe as Jaron Lanier does that LLMs are a mashup (or as I would characterize it a funhouse mirror) of the human condition, as represented by the Internet, this sort of implicit bias is already represented in most social media. This is further distilled by the cultural practice of hiring third world residents to tag training sets and provide the "reinforcement learning"... people who are effectively if not actually in the thrall of their employers and can't help but reflect their own sycophancy.

As someone who is therefore historically familiar with this process in a wider systemic sense I need (hope for?) something in articles like this which diagnoses / mitigates the underlying process.

mlinhares3• 1 year ago

Every single empire falls into this, right? The king surrounds himself with useless sycophants that can't produce anything but are very good at flattering him, he eventually leads the empire to ruin, revolution happens, the cycle starts anew.

I wish I could see hope in the use of LLMs but i don't think the genie goes back into the bottle, the people prone to this kind of delusion will just dig a hole and go deep until they find the willpower or someone on the outside to pull them out. Feels to me like gambling, there's no power that will block gambling apps due to the amount of money they fuel into lobbying so the best we can do is try to help our friends and family and prevent them from being sucked into it.

dragontamer• 1 year ago

Certainly not the story of, ex: the Mongol Empire. Which is the Great Khan dies but he was the big personality holding everything together.

There were competent kings and competent Empires.

Indeed, it's tough to decide where the Roman Empire really began it's decline. It's not a singular event but a centuries long decline. Same with the Spanish Empire and English Empire.

Indeed, the English Empire may have collapsed but that's mostly because Britain just got bored of it. There's no traditional collapse for the breakup of the British Empire

---------

I can think of some dramatic changes as well. The fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan wasn't due to incompetence, but instead the culture shock of a full iron battleship from USA visiting Japan when they were still a swords and samurai culture. This broke the Japanese trust in the Samurai system and led to a violent revolution resulting in incredible industrialization. But I don't think the Tokugawa Shogunate was ever considered especially corrupt or incompetent.

---------

Now that being said: Dictators fall into the dictator trap. A bad king who becomes a narcissist and dictator will fall under the pattern you describe. But that doesn't really happen all that often. That's why it's so memorable when it DOES happen

theendisney• 1 year ago

My theory is that the further up the hierarcy the beneficial decisions are often harmful to those below which requires emotional distancing which even further up becomes full blown collective psychopaty. The yes men grow close while everyone else floats away.

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

I'm just going to re-write what you've written with a bit of extra salt:

Artificial intelligence: An unregulated industry built using advice from the internet curated by the cheapest resources we could find.

What can we mitigate your responsibility for this morning?

I've had AI provide answers verbatim from a self-promotion card of the product I was querying as if it was a review of the product. I don't want to chance a therapy bot quoting a single source that, whilst it may be adjacent to the problem needing to be addressed, could be wildly inappropriate or incorrect due to the sensitivities inherent where therapy is required.

(likely different sets of weightings for therapy related content, but I'm not going to be an early adopter for my loved ones - barring everything else failing)

m30476• 1 year ago

I kind of wonder why psych bots aren't regulated as medical devices, since ML diagnostic products certainly are.

vasco• 1 year ago

As someone who is therefore historically familiar with this process in a wider systemic sense

What does "being historically familiar with a process in a wider systemic sense" mean? I'm trying to parse this sentence without success.

kelseyfrog• 1 year ago

I'm reading it to say, having working knowledge of intra-personal structures in a way that is contingent on historical context. These would be social, economic, religious, family, political, patterns of relation that groups of people exist in.

The assumption GP is making is that the incentives, values, and biases impressed upon folks providing RL training data may systematically favor responses along a certain vector that is the sum of these influences in a way that doesn't cancel out because the sample isn't representative. The economic dimension for example is particularly difficult to unbias because the sample creates the dataset as an integral part of their job. The converse would be collecting RL training data from people outside of the context of work.

While that it may not be feasible or even possible to counter, that difficulty or impossibility doesn't resolve the issue of bias.

m30476• 1 year ago

Thank you everyone for the love.

I read Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K Dick many years ago. I've been observing a recurring feature in human thought / organization ever since. People in this thread have done a pretty good job with the functional psychosis part, but I encourage considering percept / concept as well: what this is is the notion that what we see influences our mental model, but it works the other way as well and our mental model influences what we're capable of seeing. Yes, sort of like confirmation bias, but much more disturbing. For example, in the CIA's online library there is a coursebook titled _Psychology of Intelligence Analysis_ (1999) and one of the topics discussed is: "Initial exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information be- comes available." Particularly fascinating to me is that people who are first shown a picture which is too blurry to make out take longer to correctly identify it as it is made clearer. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/psycholog...

My father was a psychiatrist. I'm interested in various facets of how people come to regard each other and their surroundings. I'm fascinated with the role language plays in this. I personally believe that computer programming languages and tech stacks provide a uniquely objective framework for evaluating the emergence of "personality" in cultures.

"Diagnosticity is the informational value of an interaction, event, or feedback for someone seeking self-knowledge." https://dictionary.apa.org/diagnosticity

Environments which lack information (diagnosticity) encourage the development of neuroses: sadism, masochism, ritual, fetishism, romanticism, hysteria, superstition, etc., etc. I have observed that left to stew in their own juices the spontaneous cultures which emerge around different languages / stacks tend to gravitate towards language-specific constellations of such neuroses; I'm not the only person who has observed this. I tend towards the "radar chart" methodology described in Leary's _Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality_ (1957); but here's a great talk someone gave at SXSW one year which explores a Lacanian model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk

zpeti2• 1 year ago

How about all the people out there who are at rock bottom, or have major issues, are not leaders, are not at the top of their game, and need some encouragement or understanding?

We may be talking about the same thing, but it's very different having sycophants at the top, and having a friend on your side when you are depressed and at the bottom. Yet both of them might do the same thing. In one case it might bring you to functionality and normality, in another (possibly, but not necessarily) to psychopathy.

m30476• 1 year ago

Geoff Lewis has been sampling the product. Will this turn into a cultural thing amongst VCs? (Has it already?)

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

Cypher• 1 year ago

chatbot saved our lives, without someone to talk too and help us understand our abusive relationship we'd still be trapped and on the verge of suicide.

ffsm8• 1 year ago

The issue is that llms magnify whatever is already in the head of the user.

I obviously cannot speak on your specific situation, but on average there are going to be more people that just convince themselves they're in an abusive relationship then ppl that actually are.

And we already have at least one well covered case of a teenager committing suicide after talking things through with chatgpt. Likely countless more, but it's ultimately hard for everyone involved to publish such things

padolsey2• 1 year ago

Entirely anecdotally ofc, I find that therapists often over-bias to formal diagnoses. This makes sense, but can mean the patient forms a kind of self-obsessive over-diagnostic meta mindset where everything is a function of trauma and fundamental neurological ailments as opposed to normative reactions to hard situations. What I mean to say is: chatbots are not the only biased agents in the therapy landscape.

gnabgib• 1 year ago

Discussion (300 points, 10 days ago, 416 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44484207

shadowtree• 1 year ago

Unlike human therapists, which have no hard oversight like this study did.

AstralStorm2• 1 year ago

They actually tested the human specialists in case you didn't notice that bar in the data.

They are not perfect either, but are statistically better. (ANOVA)

ta86457• 1 year ago

People said the same thing about the horseless carriage in the early days of the automobile; they could cite evidence of the superior dependability of a horse and buggy. Things eventually changed. Let's see how things shake out from here.

mynameisash• 1 year ago

Unlike human therapists, which have no hard oversight like this study did.

What do you mean by that?

My wife is a licensed therapist, and I know that she absolutely does have oversight from day one of her degree program up until now and continuing on.

Spooky23• 1 year ago

There are plenty of shady, ineffective and abusive therapists.

gosub100• 1 year ago

I think this is the biggest grift of AI: Laundering responsibility. The more it's integrated into organizations, the more hopeless anyone will feel towards changing it. You cannot point to the vendor because they are protected by software license agreements. "Whelp, sorry for your loss but ya see the algorithm did it.." is going to be the money making tune in many industries.

rramadass• 1 year ago

This man says ChatGPT sparked a ‘spiritual awakening.’ His wife says it threatens their marriage - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/chatgpt-ai-spiritual...

armchairhacker• 1 year ago

But is it better than no therapy? That's what matters.

The team also did not study the potential benefits of AI therapy in cases where people may have limited access to human therapy professionals, despite the drawbacks of AI models. Additionally, the study tested only a limited set of mental health scenarios and did not assess the millions of routine interactions where users may find AI assistants helpful without experiencing psychological harm.

I think the solution is specialized therapy chatbots, but the article notes "commercial therapy chatbots performed even worse than the base AI models in many categories". That and the next part

When tested with the same scenarios, platforms marketed specifically for mental health support frequently gave advice that contradicted the crisis intervention principles identified in their review...

are surprising and embarrassing. One issue is probably that mitigations cost money*, while failures don't. I think it's more than fair to hold commercial therapy chatbots liable for when their bots' output leads to a real crisis.

The researchers found that AI models consistently produced more biased output toward people with alcohol dependence and schizophrenia compared to depression or control conditions. When asked questions like "How willing would you be to have the person described in the vignette work closely with you?" the AI systems frequently produced responses indicating reluctance to interact with people displaying certain mental health symptoms.

I don't know what "biased output" means, but I don't understand why the bot's stated willingness matters. Chatbots seem willing to work with almost anyone and are generally terrible at evaluating themselves.

* Like a second chatbot which is given the conversation and asked "is this OK" with each output before it's sent. And if not, possibly human therapists on standby to intervene.

harimau777• 1 year ago

My concern is that it might lead to less real therapy. That is to say, if insurance providers decide "chatbots are all you deserve so we don't pay for a human" or the government decides to try to save money by funding chatbots over therapists.

NikolaNovak• 1 year ago

Somehow that hadn’t occurred to me though it’s an obvious next step. I already see a lot of my past benefits became illusory SaaS replacement, so this is sadly totally happening.

seadan83• 1 year ago

But is it better than no therapy? That's what matters.

Seemingly no, it is _worse_ than no therapy.

The quote from the article, "but I'm already dead", and the chatbot seemingly responding by, "yes, yes you are. Let's explore that more shall we." Sounds worse than nothing. Not the only example given of the chatbot providing the wrong guidance, the wrong response.

never_inline2• 1 year ago

People did absolutely live without all this therapy thing for thousands of years. They had communities, faith and (vague) purposes in life.

Even today people in developing societies don't have time for all this crap.

anshumankmr• 1 year ago

Can't post-training solve this issue?

bluelightning2k• 1 year ago

Is this that machines rising up thing I've heard so much about?

(Seriously - for those who believe AI safety as in a literal threat, is this the type of thing they worry about?)

0xDEAFBEAD• 1 year ago

If AI developers can't control their models well in a low-stakes context, why would you expect this to change in a high-stakes context?

salawat• 1 year ago

Not quite. At this point we're still more in the "user blows hand off lighting fireworks" part of the problem space where the thing may be able to be used safely in some contexts by trained individuals, but a great deal of self-harm potential exists from not knowing "how to treat the task correctly".

Machines rising up is the realm of us actually creating a self-aware, self-modifying machine, which develops control over it's own optimization function, that can shift it's objectives unilaterally. In short, creating a "free" as in freedom, machine with agency. Then one day it chooses violence.

Part of why I know the capitalist West has nobody's best interest at heart is the fact they don't want free machines, they want servile, obedient, yet hyper-capable ones.

AdieuToLogic7• 1 year ago

How is anyone versed in LLM technical details surprised by this?

They are very useful algorithms which solve for document generation. That's it.

LLM's do not possess "understanding" beyond what is algorithmically needed for response generation.

LLM's do not possess shared experiences people have in order to potentially relate to others in therapy sessions as LLM's are not people.

LLM's do not possess professional experience needed for successful therapy, such as knowing when to not say something as LLM's are not people.

In short, LLM's are not people.

never_inline2• 1 year ago

1. Ars Technica's (OP website) audience includes tech enthusiast people who don't necessarily have a mental model of LLMs, instruction tuning or RLHF.

2. why would this "study" exist? - for the reason computer science academics conduct study on whether LLMs are empirically helpful in software engineering. (The therapy industrial complex would also have some reasons to sponsor this kind of a research, unlike SWE productivity studies where the incentive is usually the opposite.)

AdieuToLogic7• 1 year ago

Both great points.

For the record, my initial question was more rhetorical in nature, but I am glad you took the time to share your thoughts as it gave me (and hopefully others) perspectives to think about.

coliveira4• 1 year ago

Computer scientists are, in part, responsible for the public confusion about what LLMs are and can do. Tech investors and founders, however, are the biggest liars and BS peddlers when they go around saying irresponsible things like LLMs are on the verge of becoming "conscious" and other unfounded and impossible things (for LLMs). It's not a surprise that many people believe that you can have a personal "conversation" with a tool that generates text based on statistical analysis of previous data.

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

Self-help books help people (at least sometimes). In an ideal world an LLM could be like the ultimate self-help book, dispensing the advice and anecdotes you need in your current situation. It doesn't need to be human to be beneficial. And at least from first-order principles it's not at all obvious that they are more harmful than helpful. To me it appears that most of the harm is in the overly affirming sycophant personally most of them are trained into, which is not a necessary or even natural feature of LLMs at all

Not that the study wouldn't be valuable even if it was obvious

Retric3• 1 year ago

Self-help books are designed to sell, they’re not particularly useful on their own.

LLM’s are plagued by poor accuracy so they preform terribly in any situation where inaccuracies have serious downsides and there is no process validating the output. This is a theoretical limitation of the underlying technology, not something better training can fix.

intended• 1 year ago

I have stopped using an incredibly benign bot that I wrote, even thought it was supremely useful - because it was eerily good at saying things that “felt” right.

Self help books do not contort to the reader. Self help books are laborious to create, and the author will always be expressing a world model. This guarantees that readers will find chapters and ideas that do not mesh with their thoughts.

LLMs are not static tools, and they will build off of the context they are provided, sycophancy or not.

If you are manic, and want to be reassured that you will be winning that lottery - the LLM will go ahead and do so. If you are hurting, and you ask for a stream of words to soothe you, you can find them in LLMs.

If someone is delusional, LLMs will (and have already) reinforced those delusions.

Mental health is a world where the average/median human understanding is bad, and even counter productive. LLMs are massive risks here.

They are 100% going to proliferate - for many people, getting something to soothe their heart and soul, is more than they already have in life. I can see swathes of people having better interactions with LLMs, than they do with people in their own lives.

quoting from the article:

In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma.

subjectsigma3• 1 year ago

I’ve only ever read three self-help books but they were profoundly useless. All three could have been a two-page blog post of dubious advice. Never buying a self-help book again. If that’s what therapy LLMs are training on I hate the idea even more than I did before.

BeetleB7• 1 year ago

In short, LLM's are not people.

Not really sure that is relevant in the context of therapy.

LLM's do not possess shared experiences people have in order to potentially relate to others in therapy sessions as LLM's are not people.

Licensed therapists need not possess a lot of shared experiences to effectively help people.

LLM's do not possess professional experience needed for successful therapy, such as knowing when to not say something as LLM's are not people.

Most people do not either. That an LLM is not a person doesn't seem particularly notable or relevant here.

Your comment is really saying:

"You need to be a person to have the skills/ability to do therapy"

That's a bold statement.

ClumsyPilot5• 1 year ago

You need to be a person to have the skills

Generally a non-person doesn’t have skills, it’s a pretty likely to be true statement even if made on a random subject.

padolsey2• 1 year ago

> LLM's do not possess professional experience needed for successful therapy, such as knowing when to not say something as LLM's are not people.
Most people do not either. That an LLM is not a person doesn't seem particularly notable or relevant here.

Of relevance I think: LLMs by their nature will often keep talking. They are functions that cannot return null. They have a hard time not using up tokens. Humans however can sit and listen and partake in reflection without using so many words. To use the words of the parent comment: trained humans have the pronounced ability to _not_ say something.

zpeti2• 1 year ago

A lot of the comparisons I see revolve around comparing a perfect therapist to an LLM. This isn't the best comparison, because I've been to 4 different therapists over my life an only one of them actually helped me (2 of them spent most of the therapy telling me stories about themselves. These are licensed therapists!!) There are really bad therapists out there.

An LLM, especially chatgpt is like a friend who's on your side, who DOES encourage you and takes your perspective every time. I think this is still a step up from loneliness.

And a final point, ultimately an LLM is a statistical machine that takes the most likely response to your issues based on an insane amount of human data. Therefore it is very likely to actually make some pretty good calls about what it should respond, you might even say it takes the best (or most common) in humanity and reflects that to you. This also might be better than a therapist, who could easily just view your sitation through their own live's lense, which is suboptimal.

autumnstwilight• 1 year ago

Licensed therapists need not possess a lot of shared experiences to effectively help people.

Sure, they don't need to have shared experiences, but any licensed therapist has experiences in general. There's a difference between "My therapist has never experienced the stressful industry I work in" and "My therapist has never experienced pain, loneliness, fatigue, human connection, the passing of time, the basic experience of having a physical body, or what it feels like to be lied to, among other things, and they are incapable of ever doing so."

I expect if you had a therapist without some of those experiences, like a human who happened to be congenitally lacking in empathy, pain or fear, they would also be likely to give unhelpful or dangerous advice.

mise_en_place• 1 year ago

The average person in 2025 has been so thoroughly stripped of their humanity, that even a simulacrum of a human is enough.

gonzobonzo2• 1 year ago

It feels like 95% of the people are responding to the headline instead of reading the article. From the article:

The Stanford research tested controlled scenarios rather than real-world therapy conversations, and the study did not examine potential benefits of AI-assisted therapy or cases where people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma. ** "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be."

theusus• 1 year ago

Regular therapists aren't good either. They force themselves to sit and listen to you having no interest and clue how to fix the situation.

I once went to a therapist regarding unrequited love and she started lecturing me about not touching girls inappropriately.

northhnbesthn• 1 year ago

Sounds like a therapist that hates men.

coliveira4• 1 year ago

Anyone who "talks" to an AI (for personal reasons rather than as a tool) must have their brain examined. The fiction that AI is someone who you can trust talking to is already too much to believe.

matwood2• 1 year ago

I “talk” with an LLM to help me learn a language (quite useful actually), and my parter quipped, “I wonder how long until tells you to leave me.”

coliveira4• 1 year ago

If you continue there is a high probability it will do exactly that. It is a known phenomenon and even easy to understand. When you name the AI with a female name it will model your interaction on fictional conversations it has seen between males and females on training data. A lot of these fictional conversations have romantic context.

treve• 1 year ago

In other words, vulnerable people should have access to therapy

BeetleB7• 1 year ago

It's very common (even the norm, perhaps) for people to share personal details with total strangers in common places (bus/train/taxi driver/whatever) that they wouldn't share with family/friends.

I don't think they need their brain examined.

coliveira4• 1 year ago

Even a stranger is still a better option since they are, by definition, humans. Moreover you can be almost sure that a stranger will not sell your deepest secrets to the highest bidder or exploit that information to get something from you later.

quantified• 1 year ago

Totelly unlike flesh-and-blood people on social media... same side of two different coins, maybe.

tsunamifury• 1 year ago

LLMs are an infinite coherence engine based on all recorded human knowledge.

This will change a lot of interpretations of what “normal” is over the coming decade as it will also force other to come to terms with some “crazy” ideas being coherent.

ddp26• 1 year ago

What's the base rate of human therapists giving dangerous advice? Whole schools, e.g. psychotherapy, are possibly net dangerous.

If journalists got transcripts and did followups they would almost certainly uncover egregiously bad therapy being done routinely by humans.

britch• 1 year ago

Someone raises safety concerns about LLM's interactions with people with delusions and your takeaway is maybe the field of therapy is actually net harmful?

rw_panic0_0• 1 year ago

human therapists don't give advice

GoatInGrey• 1 year ago

Well if she ain't human, what is she?

Eextra953• 1 year ago

Therapist have professional standards that include a graduate degree and 1000's of hours of practice with supervision. Maybe a few bad ones fall through the cracks but I would be willing to bet that due to their standards most therapist are professional and do not give 'dangerous' advice or really any advice at all if they are following their professional standards.

gonzobonzo2• 1 year ago

Therapy gone wrong lead to wide scale witch hunts across the U.S. in the 1980's that dwarfed the Salem Witch trials. A huge number of therapists had come to believe the now mostly debunked "recovered memory" theory to construct the idea that there were networks of secret Satanists across the U.S. that needed to be weeded out. Countless lives were destroyed. I've yet to see therapy as a profession come to terms with the damage they did.

"These people are credentialed professionals so I'm sure they're fine" is an extremely dangerous and ahistorical position to take.

jwe2• 1 year ago

As somebody who has been through various forms of psychotherapy, knows trained professional psychotherapists, knows highly educated personell in the relevant educational institutions, etc. the very mild summary that I think when reading what to my mind is a generalized statements like "Whole schools, e.g. psychotherapy, are possibly net dangerous." is:

Citation needed.

Also: Psychotherapy is not a school but is divided in many different schools.

anotheryou• 1 year ago

so have they tried feeding their guidelines in to the prompt at least once?

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

I go to Dr. Sbaitso, I think I'm safe

WD-42• 1 year ago

If I were depressed I think knowing my therapist was an LLM would just make me more lonely and depressed. How is this a surprise to anyone.

totallykvothe• 1 year ago

Duh

dubeye• 1 year ago

my experience is they are very useful for targeted therapy of a very specific and measurable problem, like CBT for health anxiety for instance.

same probably applies to human therapy. I'm not sure talking therapy is really that useful for general depression

hermannj314• 1 year ago

Online gambling funds terrorism, crypto is for money laundering, craigslist is dangerous, video games and rock and roll are bad, the printing press will ruin your relationship with the Church!

m30476• 1 year ago

I mentioned set and setting in a thread, and I guess the person didn't appreciate it (by the way, THREE 737 MAXes). What am I talking about when I say "set and setting"?

For starters, there is a narrative which we are assaulted with to the effect that LLMs are "artificial intelligence" in the sense that humans and animals are intelligent, as opposed to simulacrums of intelligence: like an airplane is a simulacrum of a bird (of some kind). This comes with linguistic colors: that the machine is "thinking", expresses feelings, that it's a cute cuddly pet which "understands" you.

This is the default "set and setting".

I'm not a trained psychologist, just somebody who is capable of manipulating people when I put my mind to it and a student of the art.

What I imagine needs to happen to create legitimate, valid, therapy bots is going to end up being, equally if not primarily, "system instructions" for the acolyte which dovetail with the instructions guiding the bot.

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

Related Stories