So I was talking to my mother today and she started talking about my brother, who is neurodiverse (we all are to some degree lol) and has always had trouble learning in school.
But over the past few years he managed to go from what is basically the ‘lowest’ possible degree to nearly a college degree. She said that he went to ChatGPT a lot for help fir writing essays and stuff and that he managed to go from struggling to write a one page report to getting straight A’s and B’s, which really surprised me.
What also surprised me is that he suffers from anxiety like me but that he talks to ChatGPT like it is a friend and that it really manages to comfort him when he is having anxiety attacks, going against the anxious thoughts he has at these moments. It never occurred to me that it could be used as a low entry level therapy form.
For example, asbestos was found in his house and he became really anxious about it to the point he could not function properly anymore. And he went to chat with ChatGPT about it and it gave him information on asbestos, on how high the chance was of something happening, of the building materials in the houses build in the decade in my specific hometown, etc. And it helped him get through his anxiety attack.
ChatGPT gets a lot of shit and rightfully so I guess but this specific use really surprised me and made me wonder if it could greatly benefit stuff like mental healthcare or learning problems.
To me this is indicative and symptomatic of the severe degeneration of society under neoliberal capitalism. Emotional and psychological support structures that are supposed to be there for people in the form of community, family, social services, etc. are instead offloaded onto these fake electronic simulacra of humanity. Humans are social beings, but when that community and social support that we need is missing because the system we live in is so deeply anti-human, we turn to what is ultimately a very poor and potentially dangerous replacement for real human connection. This takes various forms for different people, whether it’s so-called “AI” or something else, perhaps some form of commodity fetishism to fill a void, but none of these coping mechanisms are sufficient replacement for the real thing which is human to human interaction. At best you are temporarily treating a symptom while the systemic underlying cause festers unabated.