I know it’s not even close there yet. It can tell you to kill yourself or to kill a president. But what about when I finish school in like 7 years? Who would pay for a therapist or a psychologist when you can ask for help a floating head on your computer?
You might think this is a stupid and irrational question. “There is no way AI will do psychology well, ever.” But I think in today’s day and age it’s pretty fair to ask when you are deciding about your future.
Eh, I give it 5 years.
Never say never, because everything is possible given enough time. The only question being how much time.
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
I won’t trust a tech company with my most intimate secrets. Human therapists won’t get fully replaced by ai
You are putting WAY too much faith in the ability of programmers. Real AI that can do the job of a therapist is decades away, at least - and then there’s the approval process, which will take years all by itself. Don’t underestimate that. AI therapy is uncharted territory, and the approval process will be lengthy, detailed, and incredibly strict.
Lastly, there’s public acceptance. Even if AI turns out to have measurably better outcomes, if people aren’t comfortable with it, statistics won’t matter. People aren’t rational. I don’t care how “good” Alexa is, or how much evidence you show me - I will never accept that a piece of software can understand what it’s like to grow up as a person. I want to talk about my issues with a flawed, fallible human, not a box plugged into the wall.
You ask a valid question, just much earlier than necessary. I’d be surprised if AI was a viable alternative by the time you retire.
There are already digital therapeutic platforms approved for mental health. Orexo deprexis is one such program. The fact is that the vast majority of people who need therapy aren’t getting it now. These ai therapy models will provide services to those people. I’m willing to bet that in a decade, the majority of therapy will be done by AI, with human therapists focused on the most severe behavioral health conditions.
I don’t think the AI everyone is so buzzed about today is really a true AI. As someone summed it up: it’s more like a great autocomplete feature but it’s not great at understanding things.
It will be great to replace Siri and the Google assistant but not at giving people professional advice by a long shot.
Not saying an LLM should substitute a professional psychological consultant, but that someone is clearly wrong and doesn’t understand current AI. Just FYI
Care to elaborate?
It’s an oversimplified statement from someone (sorry I don’t have the source) and I’m not exactly an AI expert but my understanding is the current commercial AI products are nowhere near the “think and judge like a human” definition. They can scrape the internet for information and use it to react to prompts and can do a fantastic job to imitate humans, but the technology is simply not there.
The technology for human intelligence? Any technology would be always very different from human intelligence. What you probably are referring to is AGI, that is defined as artificial general intelligence, which is an “intelligent” agent that doesn’t excel in anything, but is able to handle a huge variety of scenarios and tasks, such as humans.
LLM are specialized models to generate fluent text, but very different from autocompletes because can work with concepts, semantics and (pretty surprisingly) with rather complex logic.
As oversimplification even humans are fancy autocomplete. They are just different, as LLMs are different.
