[josephg]

I think a well trained LLM could be amazing at being a therapist. But general purpose LLMs like ChatGPT have a problem: They’re trained to be far too user led. They don’t challenge you enough. Or steer conversations appropriately.

I think there’s a huge opportunity if someone could get hold of really top tier therapy conversations and trained a specialised LLM using them. No idea how you’d get those transcripts but that would be a wonderfully valuable thing to make if you could pull it off.

[mwcampbell]

> They’re trained to be far too user led. They don’t challenge you enough.

An anecdote here: I recently had a conversation with Claude that could be considered therapy or at least therapy-adjacent. To Anthropic's credit, Claude challenged me to take action (in the right direction), not just wallow in my regrets. Still, it may be true that general-purpose LLMs don't do this consistently enough.

[hitarpetar]

> No idea how you’d get those transcripts

you wouldn't. what you're describing as a wonderfully valuable thing would be a monstrous violation of patient confidentiality. I actually can't believe you're so positive about this idea I suspect you might be trolling

[josephg]

I'm serious. You would have to do it with the patient's consent of course. And of course anonymize any transcripts you use - changing names and whatnot.

Honestly I suspect many people would be willing to have their therapy sessions used to help others in similar situations.