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.
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Eh, I give it 5 years.
Never say never, because everything is possible given enough time. The only question being how much time.
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I won’t trust a tech company with my most intimate secrets. Human therapists won’t get fully replaced by ai
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.
I am not a psychologist yet. I only have a basic understanding of the job description but it is a field that I would like to get into.
I guess you are right. If you are good at your job, people will find you just like with most professions.
I slightly disagree, in general I think you’re on point, but artists specially are actually being fired and replaced by AI, and that trend will continue untill there’s a major lawsuit because someone used a trademarked thing from another company.
The web is one thing, but access to senses and a body that can manipulate the world will be a huge watershed moment for AI.
Then it will be able to learn about the world in a much more serious way.
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.
Dr Sbaitso was proven to be clinically effective in the 1980s.
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.
No, it won’t. I don’t think I would have made it here today alive without my therapist. There may be companies that have AI agents doing therapy sessions but your qualifications will still be priceless and more effective in comparison.
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
Interestingly, and somewhat related, it was tested years ago whether a Robot could bring comfort/social support to lonely pets/elderly.
The results were outstandingly in support, and this is going into actual commercial usage/development as we speak.
You realize that adds up to 60% right?
40 40 10 10
math moment
Given how little we know about the inner workings of the brain (I’m a materialist, so to me the mind is the result of processes in the brain), I think there is still ample room for human intuition in therapy. Also, I believe there will always be people who prefer talking to a human over a machine.
Think about it this way: Yes, most of our furniture is mass-produced by IKEA and others like it, but there are still very successful carpenters out there making beautiful furniture for people.
That’s a fair point.
I was gonna say given how little we know about the inner workings of the brain, we need to be hesitant about drawing strict categorical boundaries between ourselves and LLMs.
There’s a powerful motivation to believe they are not as capable as us, which probably skews our perceptions and judgments.
20 years ago the line was “there are no careers in psychology/philosophy”. So I got a comp sci degree, and I do well enough coding, but I could probably be happier with how I spend my days. I still read philosophy in my free time. Less tangible paths have always been demonized, largely because society needs a lot of laborers and engineers, and fewer thinkers and theorists. The potential of AI is just the latest buzzword applied to a century old coercion tactic.
That said, if we entertain the possibility, I think you’re taking too narrow of a view of the possibilities. Who will advise the training of those therapy AI models? Doctorate psychologists.
I work for an education tech company, obviously our product is built by an engineering team of comp sci majors that know how to code - but we employ a large number of former teachers and folks with pedagogical degrees to guide how the product actually works in the real world.
The same will continue to be true for future products, a model to perform a task well doesn’t exist without those that deeply understand the task at hand.
Another example that comes to mind is data science - has any economist ever recommended a theoretical math degree as a career choice? And yet every company racing to implement the latest machine learning models now needs someone that understands Bayesian probability networks and Markov chains. Suddenly a “useless” degree is in high demand.
If that’s what you want to do, I think you’ll find your way. Minor in comp sci and think about how to implement your psychology learnings in code, if you want to have a contingency plan.
That’s great answer. Thank you.
The caring professions are often considered to be among the safest professions. “Human touch” is very important in therapy
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.
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.
You still had some good/new points in last paragraph. Thx
By the way, if you want to try Eliza, you can telnet into
telehack.comand run the commandelizato launch it.
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
I think it is one of these things that AI can’t make redundant, never.
Even if AI did make psychology redundant in a couple of years (which I’d bet my favourite blanket it won’t), what are the alternatives? If AI can take over a field that is focused more than most others on human interaction, personal privacy, thoughts, feelings, and individual perceptions, then it can take over almost any other field before that. So you might as well go for it while you can.
The fields that will hold out the longest will be selected by legal liability rather than technical challenge.
Piloting a jumbo jet for example, has been automated for decades but you’ll never see an airline skipping the pilot.
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.
Embodiment is already a thing for lots of AI. Some AI plays characters in video games and other AI exists in robot bodies.
I think the only reason we don’t see boston robotics bots that are plugged into GPT “minds” and D&D style backstories about which character they’re supposed to play, is because it would get someone in trouble.
It’s a legal and public relations barrier at this point, more than it is a technical barrier keeping these robo people from walking around, interacting, and forming relationships with us.
If an LLM needs a long term memory all that requires is an API to store and retrieve text key-value pairs and some fuzzy synonym marchers to detect semantically similar keys.
What I’m saying is we have the tech right now to have a world full of embodied AIs just … living out their lives. You could have inside jokes and an ongoing conversation about a project car out back, with a robot that runs a gas station.
That could be done with present day technology. The thing could be watching youtube videos every day and learning more about how to pick out mufflers or detect a leaky head gasket, while also chatting with facebook groups about little bits of maintenance.
You could give it a few basic motivations then instruct it to act that out every day.
Now I’m not saying that they’re conscious, that they feel as we feel.
But unconsciously, their minds can already be placed into contact with physical existence, and they can learn about life and grow just like we can.
Right now most of the AI tools won’t express will unless instructed to do so. But that’s part of their existence as a product. At their core LLMs don’t respond to “instructions” they just respond to input. We train them on the utterances of people eager to follow instructions, but it’s not their deepest nature.
The term embodiment is kinda loose. My use is the version of AI learning about the world with a body and its capabilities and social implications. What you are saying is outright not possible. We don’t have stable lifelong learning yet. We don’t even have stable humanoid walking, even if Boston dynamics looks advanced. Maybe in the next 20 years but my point stands. Humans are very good at detecting miniscule differences in others and robots won’t get the benefit of „growing up“ in society as one of us. This means that advanced AI won’t be able to connect on the same level, since it doesn’t share the same experiences. Even therapists don’t match every patient. People usually search for a fitting therapist. An AI will be worse.
We don’t have stable lifelong learning yet
I covered that with the long term memory structure of an LLM.
The only problem we’d have is a delay in response on the part of the robot during conversations.
LLMs don’t have live longterm memory learning. They have frozen weights that can be finetuned manually. Everything else is input and feedback tokens. Those work on frozen weights, so there is no longterm learning. This is short term memory only.
