Most basic therapy dealing with relatively simple problems like mild to moderate depression and anxiety will likely be pretty responsive to AI based treatment, but people with serious and persistent mental illness will still need therapists.

I think you’re taking South Park too seriously.

All my points have already been (better) covered by others in the time it took me to type them, but instead of deleting will post anyway :)

If your concerns are about AI replacing therapists & psychologists why wouldn’t that same worry apply to literally anything else you might want to pursue? Ostensibly anything physical can already be automated so that would remove “blue-collar” trades and now that there’s significant progress into creative/“white-collar” sectors that would mean the end of everything else.

Why carve wood sculptures when a CNC machine can do it faster & better? Why learn to write poetry when there’s LLMs?

Even if there was a perfect recreation of their appearance and mannerisms, voice, smell, and all the rest – would a synthetic version of someone you love be equally as important to you? I suspect there will always be a place and need for authentic human experience/output even as technology constantly improves.

With therapy specifically there’s probably going to be elements that an AI can [semi-]uniquely deal with just because a person might not feel comfortable being completely candid with another human; I believe that’s what using puppets or animals or whatever to act as an intermediary are for. Supposedly even a really basic thing like ELIZA was able convince some people it was intelligent and they opened up to it and possibly found some relief from it, and there’s nothing in it close to what is currently possible with AI. I can envision a scenario in the future where a person just needs to vent and having a floating head just compassionately listen and offer suggestions will be enough; but I think most(?) people would prefer/need an actual human when the stakes are higher than that – otherwise the suicide hotlines would already just be pre-recorded positive affirmation messages.

Many valid points here, but here is a slightly different perspective. Let’s say for the sake of discussion AI is somehow disruptive here. So?

You cannot predict what will happen in this very fast space. You should not attempt to do so in a way that compromises your path toward your interests.

If you like accounting or art or anything else that AI may disrupt… so what? Do it because you are interested. It may be hyper important to have people that did so in any given field no matter how unexpected. And most importantly, doing what interest you is always at least part of a good plan.

It’s definitely possible, but such an AI would probably be good enough to take over every other field too. So it’s not like you can avoid it by choosing something else anyway.

And the disruption would be large enough that governments will have to react in some way.

homie lemme let you in on a secret that shouldn’t be secret

in therapy, 40% of positive client outcomes come from external factors changing

10% come from my efforts

10% come from their efforts

and the last 40% comes from the therapeutic alliance itself

people heal through the relationship they have with their counselor

not a fucking machine

this field ain’t going anywhere, not any time soon. not until we have fully sentient general ai with human rights and shit

The caring professions are often considered to be among the safest professions. “Human touch” is very important in therapy

I think it is one of these things that AI can’t make redundant, never.

I’m sure as fuck glad my therapist is a human and not a Chatbot.

Also, psychologists will be needed to design AI interfaces so humans have an easy time using them.
A friend of mine studied psychology and now works for a car company, designing their infotainment system UI so that people can instinctively use it without consulting a manual. Those kinds of jobs will become more, not less in the future.

If you’re going to avoid psychology, do it because of the replication crisis. What is being called “AI” should play no role on that. Here’s why.

Let us suppose for a moment that some AI 7y from now is able to accurately diagnose and treat psychological issues that someone might have. Even then the AI in question is not a moral agent that can be held responsible for its actions, and that is essential when you’re dealing with human lives. In other words you’ll still need psychologists picking the output of said AI and making informed decisions on what the patient should [not] do.

Furthermore, I do not think that those “AI systems” will be remotely as proficient at human tasks in, say, a decade, as some people are claiming that they will be. AI is a misnomer, those systems are not intelligent. Model-based text generators are a great example of that (and relevant in your case): play a bit with ChatGPT or Bard, and look at their output in a somewhat consistent way (without cherry picking the hits and ignoring the misses). Then you’ll notice that they don’t really understand anything - they’re reproducing grammatical patterns regardless of their content. (Just like they were programmed to.)

Psychotherapy is about building a working relationship. Transference is a big part of this relationship. I don’t feel like I’d be able to build the same kind of therapeutic relationship with an AI that I would with another human. That doesn’t mean AI can’t be a therapeutic tool. I can see how it could be beneficial with things like positive affirmations and disrupting negative thinking patterns. But this wouldn’t be a substitute for psychotherapy, just a tool for enhancing it.

It’s just like with programming: The people who are scared of AI taking their jobs are usually bad at them.

AI is incredibly good at regurgitating information and translation, but not at understanding. Programming can be viewed as translation, so they are good at it. LLMs on their own won’t become much better in terms of understanding, we’re at a point where they are already trained on all the good data from the internet. Now we’re starting to let AIs collect data directly from the world (chatGPT being public is just a play to collect more data), but that’s much slower.

There is the theory that most therapy methods work by building a healthy relationship with the therapist and using that for growth since it’s more reliable than the ones that caused the issues in the first place. As others have said, I don’t believe that a machine has this capability simply by being too different. It’s an embodiment problem.

If you have a talk with the AI called Pi, it talks like a therapist. It’s impressive at first but you can’t escape the knowledge that it dgaf about you.

And that’s a trait people really don’t want in a therapist.

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