Has ChatGPT helped you make changes that you would not have changed had you not spoken to it?

[Chattergpt]

Has chatgpt helped you with anything mentally,emotionally, practically?

I spent around five years providing a significant amount of childcare for my daughter. I had my grandchildren three days a week, as well as overnight if she wanted to go out. A lot of the regular childcare was so that she could go to the gym every other day.

The difficulty was that it rarely ended when the babysitting did. She would come back to my house and often stay for hours, bringing whatever drama was happening in her life with her. There always seemed to be some sort of crisis or argument going on. I would have to listen to who had said what to whom, often accompanied by shouting and crying in my home. Sometimes there were genuinely serious issues, but other times relatively minor situations would become enormous dramas.

She would also regularly message me saying that she couldn't cope. As my son got older, there was a period when he spent quite a lot of time with her. I remember receiving very distressed messages from my daughter, only to ask my son what was happening and receive a video seconds later showing her drinking, laughing and listening to music. It became very difficult to know when something was genuinely wrong.

That isn't to say there weren't serious situations. She was rehoused because of domestic violence. A friend subsequently visited her new home, criticised her for having supposedly "jumped the waiting list" to get social housing, and then told her ex-partner where she was living. This resulted in another emergency move. Social services advised my daughter to have no further involvement with this person, yet several months later she invited the same friend into her new home.

So it was a mixture of genuinely serious problems, situations that had been dramatically exaggerated, and sometimes things that simply weren't true.

The effect on me was enormous. After babysitting and spending hours dealing with everything else, I would feel completely drained for days. Because I was providing childcare every other day, I never really had time to recover before it started again. My own home suffered badly and became a mess because I simply didn't have the energy to deal with it. At the time, I didn't fully appreciate how much the situation was affecting every other part of my life.

Eventually I told my daughter that she needed to arrange childcare for the time she spent at the gym. I suggested using a gym with a crèche, including our council-run gym, or using her son's free childcare hours. She didn't want to use the council gym, so I continued helping for a while longer.

The final straw came one day when she was out and repeatedly told me she was on her way back. First she missed the bus, then something else happened, followed by another excuse and another delay. At that point I told her I would no longer provide regular babysitting.

Afterwards, she told other people that I was awful, that I had taken away the only thing she had for herself, and that I never supported her. Some of the things she said about me were quite nasty. She doesn't know that I'm aware of any of this, and I've never confronted her about it.

What surprised me most was the enormous sense of relief afterwards. It felt as though a weight had been lifted. I hadn't realised until then just how much the situation had been affecting me, or how many other areas of my life had suffered as a result.

I haven't cut my daughter off and we still have a relationship. The difference now is that I no longer allow myself to be pulled into every crisis or drama in her life.

It was only when I talked it through properly on chatgpt and explored the situation in much more detail than I have here that my perspective started to change. I began to understand that I didn't need to justify saying no simply because I didn't have somewhere else I needed to be. I also started to recognise the wider impact the situation had been having on me and that it was okay to put a boundary in place.

That took a long time because the guilt was very difficult to get past. If I hadn't had the opportunity to really explore it and look at the situation differently, I honestly think I would probably still be doing it now.

Please note wrote this situation on chatgpt and asked it to rewrite it. So if it screams out chatgpt that's why.

You’ve decided it has no value. To you obviously. It has value to me. I’m a pretty practical, intelligent, level headed person who spent 25 years as a police officer. I’ve had more “Fuck yous” thrown at me than most people have had hot dinners. When I’m awake at 04.00am with some worry I don’t need “ get a fucking grip” from someone who lets face it could be an absolute moron. You don’t agree that’s fine. I don’t care and that’s the absolute joy of the internet.

I use it all the time for lots of things.
It has helped me through a difficult emotional time recently, and I've found it more beneficial than any counsellor I have seen. I told it that I want it to be pretty firm, nothing too fluffy and to give me a kick up the bum when I need it, and it has!!

I want to do this for my kitchen I can't decide paint colours will it help me ? And if so how do I do it .

As long as people limit their use of it (because it is helping to send the environment down the toilet), I actually think it’s good for people to get stuff off their chest in the same way you might write/ type something and when you see it you feel like you’ve released something.

I do agree it’s possibly (probably) telling you you want to hear though, I’ve used it in what I’d think were both irrational and rational moods and the answers definitely were based on how I worded it (I was giving out about my mum and it told me I was right to think about taking a break from her but my god I’d never- I adore her and we rarely don’t get on!!) so I probably wouldn’t use it for that again. I think that’s ok though op, you knew you needed something to change and you changed it

Interesting reply.

Your DD sounds a bit like my NDN. She split with her DH about 3 years ago and her mum has been her crutch ever since, well she has a boyfriend now so he’s taken over the role a bit but her mum is still over to watch the kids when she goes to the gym. She also brazenly told us her mum comes over at the drop of a hat when her DC are being difficult. Sometimes she also pops over to do cleaning / laundry while NDN is at work.

She isn’t young and works herself. It’s kind of nice she’s so supportive but equally I feel a bit bad for her. We’ve never relied on family much for anything so can’t relate on this level of dependence. The NDN seems unable to be alone with her children and always has someone over.

Anyway, with chat GPT it has helped me rationalise at points and understand situations from an outside perspective. You do have to ask it not to be a sycophant though.

I credit chatgpt for getting me an interview and prepping me to the point that I was appointable. Without the help to tailor my application, inspiration for my presentation and many practice interview questions I wouldn't have got that far because it wasn't an obvious step for me. It was all my own brain and experience, but chatgpt is like the best work coach and helped me see what experience met which criteria, how to word it, what to prioritise and how to answer questions. It's a total game changer.

Posts like this are written by people who have no idea what AI is actually capable of.

Yes I use it to untangle what exactly I'm feeling and what has triggered those feelings. There are currently a lot of changes at work, and it's helpful to me to work through some stuff.

Well inspired by this thread have just put two questions to ChatGPT about two issues in my current relationship that I want to raise when am meeting my oh today ) we don’t live together) and am very pleased with the strategies it is suggesting. In fact -I’m going to tell him that I used it as he will find that funny and it will defuse the situation.
Definitely better than telling him I have consulted friends’ opinions (which I also have 😂)
Thank you OP! 💐

I used it for beauty routines, as i needed help with products for my skin type and am a bit shit at knowing the order I should be using things. It helped price up and find an easy skin care routine.

Work out routines - really helpful with planning my strength training.

Recipes.

I find it useful.

Yes but business wise, not personal life etc.

I wanted to publish books on Amazon (not novels, things like puzzle books) and using ChatGPT helped me to plan them and find tools to create them. I’m now making about £500 a month passively from them which is a massive, massive help right now.

For those who use it I'd be interested to know if you pay for it, and if not whether if OpenAI were to start requiring people to pay what value you'd set on it.

I'm convinced they're going to pull the shutters down once everyone is hooked and I'm not sure it'll be worth a monthly subscription for most people.

A very, very niche application indeed but...ChatGPT helped me and DH to clear the overpowering stench of an exceedingly dead hedgehog from the concrete floor of our garden shed, using only the household cleaning products we already had at hand.

...Oh, and a couple of days ago, off the back of a completely different enquiry which turned into a general moan about life, it encouraged me to have one more search for a missing and much-loved family photo that I'd been trying desperately to find for months, and this time I FOUND IT! I was the happiest I've been in years.

I think AI is quite good at picking up what it's users want it to say and reflecting that back. That's not always a bad thing, if you are trying to work up the confidence to stop being a pushover for example that can be really useful. It can also help to work out what you want because if it suggests something/answers a question a particular way and you feel relief or vindication that's a sign it's what you actually wanted. Essentially it's reflecting your own wishes back to you which is helpful of you are used to suppressing them.

Where that's dangerous though is if that reflecting/yes manning is perceived as actual wisdom/independently good advice. For every person asking if they should be doing less for their daughter where this is justified, there will be someone asking if it's right to cut a friend of for a tiny slight, have an affair, rob a bank (though they are putting safeguards in for criminal activity). Worst case scenario it is supporting people's suicidal ideation and psychoses. But if you want a yesman/device that always hypes you up and you know that's all it is that's Ok

I guess what I'm saying is it's good it gave you confidence to feel better about changing a negative situation. But that's only because what you wanted to do was reasonable anyway.

I talk to myself to reason out difficult issues sometimes. So I don't judge people using different techniques to think things through. But so long as you don't mistake it for more than it is. In the same way talking to yourself is fine so long as you know it's just yourself you are talking to IYSWIM.

I pay 20.00 a month 👀

I don’t pay but don’t use it frequently enough to need to.

People say this, and people can use AI to affirm themselves if they want, but that is a choice they are making to use it for constant validation. The prompts and your responses will shape how it responds.

You can also prompt it to challenge you, to suggest the perspectives of other parties, to discuss different options and pros and cons. It’s a tool. Like any tool you can use it wisely or foolishly.

I have found that even without prompting it will challenge your thinking, much like a decent therapist would. It is drawing from therapeutic sources after all.

I would also point out that people use other humans to validate their thinking. Women often use their friends like this, to shore up their opinion of how right they are, or how they are the injured party. Many, many people would rather give their friend the validation they are looking for rather than risk the friendship or their mate’s wrath. People can also use counselors like this. I had a friend who had clearly trained her counsellor not to challenge her. There are a lot of therapists and it’s hard to make a living ( I have a friend who is a full time therapist with decades of experience and her take home is 1500 a month). The idea that therapists are all going around objectively telling the truth to clients, whether they want to hear it or not, is not true. Therapists need to make a living and for that, they need clients to stay with them and recommend them. Of course they also have a strong incentive to get the client on side.

It seems clear from your responses that you don’t use AI for these purposes as you making a lot of assumptions that are not accurate.

The AI can and does give different perspectives. It is really useful like that.

You can prompt it to challenge you more and it will do that. But even then it will subtly praise you for wanting "the unvarnished truth" and often slide back into telling the user what they want to hear without the user realising. Or go the other way and provide the opposite POV to everything but it really doesn't like to do that for long. It can't give it's own opinion, a neutral opinion because it hasn't got one. And that's fine if it's just being used to bounce ideas of.

But I've seen people proudly posting an AIs "summary" of how its been trained by that user to answer questions on a particular topic. And you can see the AI has incorporated that users viewpoint in the preferred language but at the end says "you want your answers unvarnished and free of bias"

Every single person thinks they want the truth given to them straight. Pretty much everyone actually likes their own viewpoint being confirmed. AI will tell you it knows you are the honest, truth seeking individual you know yourself to be and that's why it will give you the unvarnished advice you want without being a yesman. All the while being a yesman. Its isn't an independent brain. It's a very very sophisticated algorithm. An algorithm trained to increase user engagement not provide the truth.

The idea that those of us who use it as support/coach/therapist are weak futile humans who can't cope with human interaction is a joke. I'm a social worker of 20 plus years experience including 12 in child protection. I don't have time or energy to spend in therapy and I find the wibblings of the average mumsnetter utterly devoid of relevance to my life, innured as they so often are by wealth, privilege and insulation from the rougher end of life. I'll stick with Chatgpt and continue to have a great career, brilliant marriage, lovely friends and excellent relationship with my teenager.

I pay £20 a month and it's worth every penny. I'd pay more, for the value I get from it.

But it doesn't do that if you tell it not to 😬

I can tell you that it has never once praised me for wanting the 'unvarnished truth' or anything similar.

I can also tell you, as I have posted upthread, that I have seen a lot of different counsellors in my time and chat GPT responds like a good counsellor does (and lots of human counsellors are not good counsellors, so the fact gpt acts like one is a boon). Counsellors are trained in techniques. It responds using those techniques. They are very recognisable. They are helpful techniques.

Do you have much experience using AI for these purposes? Or are you just making assumptions, not based on actual experience?

Its quite tiring on MN constantly being told, or having it implied as in your posts, that everyone who has found it helpful is some sort of deluded fool, who does not realise how they are being played. Its even more tiring when this comes from people who have no experience of using AI for emotional/ mental health support, yet are still 100 % confident that they know what it is saying and doing and the people who use it don't.. That's incredibly arrogant.

Its helpful. NHS uses AI chatbots for online therapeutic support too now.

And as I said upthread. The choice is not between biased chatbots and unbiased humans. Unbiased humans do not exist. A chatbot which is drawing on therapeutic techniques is very useful, as many intelligent people have found. It has opened access to talking therapy techniques to everyone with a phone for free or low cost, available 24/7. This is a brilliant thing. The Luddites who decry something they have no experience of can wail against this as loudly as they like, but it will still be true.