You're ignorant. Why wait until a person is so broken they need clinical therapy? Sometimes just a an ear or an oppertunity to write is sufficient. LLMs for therapy is as vaping is to quitting nicotine--extremely helpful to 80+% of people. Confession in the church setting I'd consider similar to talking to LLM. Are you anti-that too? We're talking about people that just need a tool to help them process what is going on in their life at some basic level, not more than just to acknowledge their experience.

And frankly, it's not even clear to me that a human therapist is any better. Yeah, maybe the guard-rails are in place but I'm not convinced that if those are crossed it'd result in some sociately consequences. Let people explorer their mind and experience--at the end of the day, I suspect they'd be healthier for it.

> And frankly, it's not even clear to me that a human therapist is any better.

A big point of therapy is helping the patient better ascertain reality and deal with it. Hopefully, the patient learns how to reckon with their mind better and deceive themselves less. But this requires an entity that actually exists in the world and can bear witness. LLMs, frankly, don’t deal with reality.

I’ll concede that LLMs can give people what they think therapy is about: lying on a couch unpacking what’s in their head. But this is not at all the same as actual therapeutic modalities. That requires another person that knows what they’re doing and can act as an outside observer with an interest in bettering the patient.

> Sometimes just a an ear or an oppertunity to write is sufficient.

People were able to write about their feelings and experiences before the invention of a chat bot that tells you everything that you wrote is true. Like you could do that in notepad or on a piece of paper and it was free