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The barrier to getting a traditional therapist is enormous - for some problems you're looking at years, maybe decades of treatment, at anywhere from $150-250 a pop.
In the USA techworld, your insurance will likely not cover this unless you are fortunate enough to still be on a gold plated FAANG plan. (For now.) If you're elsewhere, or working elsehow, then it is often even less likely. A second barrier, is the difficulty in finding patient-therapist fit; IMO it's worse than trying to find a kidney donor, unless your problems are very mundane (litmus: does a Hallmark card cover this?) So, access to real therapy is already hard to secure. Talk bots offer a convenient and affordable alternative. Most people will thus be fobbed off on bots that are also snitches, sycophants, and occasionally incite violence and self-harm, but that's what we have personal responsibility for, hmm? It's terribly convenient for mis-ascribing blame. Finally, there is every reason to expect that for many people there is no "transference" or deep therapeutic emotional connection with LLM therapy, and, if there is one, it's an attack surface now. In other words, the new "therapy" will be risky, ineffective, manipulative and sycophantic, so it will, in the best case scenario, do nothing, and in the worst, quite a bit of harm. But it will be very popular. Like astrology. |
But even in that case, I struggle to see how it's possible to have a deep connection with them. My life is their 45 minutes; it's just not possible for two humans to achieve given those constraints.
I'm guessing by attack surface you mean conversations will be turned to ads, right? Do you think that's a possibility given the intense competition between LLM vendors, including self-hosted options?