Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by proper_elb 1217 days ago
I don't doubt that experience, and I also have the comparison between humans and GPT and see where you are coming from. However, the advice still stands, in my eyes. If we recommend to check even simple python for correctness, how much more should we tell people to not trust LLMs when it comes to much more complex and influential things like therapy?

Also, you and some others might be able to understand the limitations of LLMs. It is the general public that I am worried about.
1 comments
andai 1217 days ago
Yes, it is extremely limited, albeit in different ways than humans are. My point was just that as a profession, they aren't currently setting a very high bar.

There are always exceptional individuals, but sadly exceptional individuals can't scale to meet the needs of a society. (There's a serious shortage of therapists, teachers, etc., even counting all the lousy ones!)

link
proper_elb 1217 days ago
> My point was just that as a profession, they aren't currently setting a very high bar.

I think I know where you are going, but I will be going offline for today soon, so I will be just leaving some thoughts regarding the matter. My background: Masters in CS, with a minor in Psychology. I have a psychology-ish circle of friends, some doing research, some doing therapy. I also have my fair share of negative experience with therapists due to some... uncommon combination of phenomena that require attention.

- One common mistake is confusing psychology (along with the more or less recent reproducibility crisis) with therapy (which is a profession that aims to help people, with some methods being grounded in psychology, some partially so, some other not at all).

- It would be weird for me to not acknowledge that there are some bad apples amongst therapists and how much it can suck being treated by one. Then again, I do not thing that the field of software development is any less diverse in the quality of output we deliver. Identifying software engineer that fulfils ones need is almost an art, maybe quite similar to finding a suitable therapist.

- "Finding a suitable therapist should not be an art!" Yes, would it not be nicer if everyone instantly found a suitable therapist? It would, but that is not the reality we live in. If even finding someone who can code a decent program that meets your relatively well-defined business needs, how much harder is it to find someone who treats multiple humans, with their unique problems, biographies and current lives?

- I am totally with you about the scaling issue! I am not against E-therapy and the usage of AI in it, but I think it has to be done with caution - not out of despair.

link