this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
132 points (88.4% liked)

Technology

58076 readers
4792 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It’s cheap, quick and available 24/7, but is a chatbot therapist really the right tool to tackle complex emotional needs?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] june 11 points 6 months ago

This is going to sound really stupid, and I should note that I am actively in therapy too.

But I had to put my dog down about a month ago, and there was a point where I just needed some validation, so I went to GPT4 and asked it some questions and told it about how I was feeling. I even fed it a poem that I wrote about her and asked if it was good.

The responses were incredibly empathetic and kind, and did an amazing job at speaking directly to the anxiety, pain, and fear I was feeling in those moments. The responses were what I needed to hear and gave me a measure of peace to get me through in those gaps when people weren’t available, or when I wasn’t able to speak them out loud. There was nothing new to me in those responses, but often times we just need to be reminded by someone or something outside of ourselves about what the truth is, and LLMs can absolutely fill that particular hole when trained properly.

My last three months in particular have been tough, and GPT4 has been a useful tool to get through a fair few storms for me.