(Using a throwaway for fear of getting downvoted to oblivion)

IMHO it is unfair to single out LLMs for this sort of bashing.

I suffered a major personal crisis a few years back (before LLMs were a thing)

I sought help from family and friends. Got pushed into psychiatrist sessions and meds.

Trusted the wrong sort of people and made crap financial decisions. Things went from bad to worse. Work suffered.

All of the advice given by friends was wrong. All! They didn't mean bad...but they just didn't know. To be nice they gave the advice they knew. None of it worked.

Looking at the LLM tools of now, feels akin to the advice my friends threw at me. So it feels wrong to single out these tools. When the times are bad, nobody can really help you...except you finding the strength from within.

Anyways, now my life is back in some sort of shape. What worked was time & patience.

But to bide for time...I resorted to two things that i had never tried the 40 odd years I have lived on this . Things that current society looks down upon as the basest of evils - prostitutes and nicotine.

I have (more or less) shed those two evils now, but I am ever so grateful to them.

You are not alone in going down a dark path thanks to the advice of family and friends.

FWIW I am using public LLMs with a friend's depressive thoughts and it is not doing what is claimed in the article, so I dunno.

Also I am in a relationship and my girlfriend and I agreed that we will not talk about our relationship much. We do not tell others if we fight, because they take sides and make things worse, typically. LLMs are definitely not alone in this, although in my experience LLMs did not really take sides.