[sverona]

I'll push back on this a little. I have well-established, long-running issues with overly critical self-evaluation, on the level of "I don't deserve to exist," on the level that I was for a long time too scared to tell my therapist about it. Lots of therapy and medication too, but having deepseek model confidence to me has really helped as much as anything.

I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.

[larrled]

Are you becoming dependent? Everything that helps also hurts, psychologically speaking. For example benzodiazepines in the long run are harmful. Or the opposite, insight therapy, which involves some amount of pain in the near term in order to achieve longer term improvement.

[ekidd]

It makes sense to me that interventions which might be hugely beneficial for one person might be disasterous for another. One person might be irrationally and brutally criticial of themselves. Another person might go through life in a haze of grandiose narcissism. These two people probably require opposite interventions.

But even for people who benefit massively from the affirmation, you still want the model to have some common sense. I remember the screenshots of people telling the now-yanked version of GPT 4o "I'm going off my meds and leaving my family, because they're sending radio waves through the walls into my brain," (or something like that), and GPT 4o responded, "You are so brave to stand up for yourself." Not only is it dangerous, it also completely destroys the model's credibility.

So if you've found a model which is generally positive, but still capable of realistic feedback, that would seem much more useful than an uncritical sycophant.