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.
LLMs cannot be therapists, it will be obvious if you try to use one for therapy. In general, do not trust anything trained and gatekept so heavily by corporations with your personal data. That being said there is one small area I’ve found pretty legit help from them in the past.
In my opinion acute anxiety is one of the few use cases I’ve found where LLMs have been absolutely superior to other things for me. I am autistic and I can at times get pretty significant health anxiety, like I’m convinced I’m dying. In the past I would google it and really freak out. Sometimes (more than once) I’ve ended up in the ER from it.
I’ve found it helpful to describe my symptoms and mention that I have severe health anxiety and I’m able to get information from it without worsening my existing anxiety. It doesn’t replace a doctor, and if I’m worried about my health it means I need to see one. But in that exact moment what I need is to calm down and realize that my symptoms are probably not dangerous.
On the other hand I cannot talk to an LLM about personal things, or like it’s a friend. I have tried, I’m not saying it for moral reasons or anything. But I just get mad with how steerable the conversation is, how formulaic the responses sometimes seem, and how full of platitudes a lot of the messages are. And if at some point it misinterprets something I’m asking and decides to refuse it can really irritate me.