Comment by orionsbelt 3 days ago
Many people are using AI for therapy now. Even if AI gets as good or better than the average therapist, I think some people will prefer to see a human in person, so her job should be safe in that sense. But I wouldn’t be surprised if rates go down as the fee sensitive shift to AI.
Unless something changes, I think that even the idea of AI being your "friend" is a giant meme. Kind of like dating apps, people will claim all the kids today have AI friends and AI therapists and talk it up as if it's just ad good, but there's a good chance that, given a decade, everyone will recognize that it's crap.
Human knowledge is not the same thing as human experience. Create an AI that experiences the world autonomously, experiences trauma and come back to me.
I say this as someone who uses AI and doesn't completely dismiss it like many on HN these days. So far, I don't see it replacing the human being for connection and understanding. Replacing coders? That's a whole other question.
I'm not sure how AI would be successful for group therapy like marriage counseling though. One of the the primary benefits is having a mediator for conversation.
I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure how good it is currently in terms of actually therapeutic benefit, but I would guess using OpenAI’s advanced voice mode, and giving it a good prompt telling it to play the role of a marriage therapist, would actually work pretty well in terms of conversing with two people, listening to both, being empathetic, guiding each person to really hear the other, etc.
I wouldn’t trust AI with my therapy. I’ve done “sessions” with it before to just see how good it would be, it’s about as good as Eliza. My wife ripped them apart.
It gets concepts wrong, and can’t resolve interweaving narratives which a human can follow without issue. The advice it gives is generic and impersonal, and if you’ve ever had real therapy, you immediately sense of it’s short comings.
I’m sure a lot of that gets less noticeable as training and models get better, but it seems like we’re plateauing in the returns we get from more training.