[scotty79]

> What is this shit for?

Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists.

Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market.

It's not as good as people at solving problems yet but it's already better than humans at bullshiting them.

[jcgrillo]

Are people actually satisfied by that? I personally find "chatting" with an LLM grating and dissatisfying because it often makes very obvious and incongruous errors, and it can't reason. It has no logical abilities at all, really. I think you're really underestimating what a therapist actually does, and what human communication actually is. It's more than word patterns.

I could see this being useful in a "dark pattern" sense, but only if it's incredibly cheap, to increase the cost to the user of engaging with customer support. If you have to argue with the LLM for an hour before being connected to an actual person who can help you, then very few calls will make it to the support staff and you can therefore have a much smaller team. But that only works if you hate your users.

[daveguy]

Subjective evaluation of "humanity" and "empathy" in responses is much less important than clinical outcome. I don't think an online chat with a nebulous entity will ever be as beneficial as interactions that can, at least occasionally, be in-person. Especially as the trust of online conversations degrade. Erosion of trust online seems like a major negative consequence of all the generative AI slop (LLM or otherwise).

[scotty79]

Clinical outcome of humans doing therapy would be better if for some reason doing therapy worse (less according to taught guidelines) was better. But, sure, we can wait for another research or follow up. It might be true. Therapy has dismal outcomes anyways and the outcomes are mostly independent of which theoretical framework the therapy is done according to. It might be the case that the only value in therapy is human connection that AI fails to simulate. But it seem that for some people it simulates connection pretty well.