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.

Google has such a heavy AI presence now that you might just as well ask ChatGPT! I've switched to Brave because I just couldn't stand it any longer.

I sometimes ask it to explain why something is done in knitting so that I can understand the reasoning behind the way the pattern is written and what effect it has on the finished article, with the hope that eventually I'll be able to modify or write a simple pattern, and it's working. I knitted a hood without a pattern and whilst it's not perfect I couldn't have hoped to do this before.

I used it and had a subscription when job hunting, it was great but also needed a lot of rewriting, especially at first. Overall a positive though. Also used it when I was finding it very hard to come to terms with the death of a pet and it was great then too. I’m definitely going to do the turn my pet into a person thing, was that ChatGPT?

I do admit Ai can be useful for questions. I use gemini all the time to help with selling on vinted, such as getting info on products. (Can't avoid it as it appears hardwired into google now anyway). Chatgpt has been helpful with lots of life questions,..but I've gone off using them a bit since I heard about a few things these ai companies are doing, such as...

-Anthropic buying up hundreds and thousands of second hand books, scanning them for info and shredding them, including lots of rare and/or banned books. Literally second hand shops have gone under because their entire stocks have been bought up. They're not the only ai company that has done this but they are the biggest. And there's always a danger that the books once lost, can never be available again. Digital copies can be altered or deleted (fahrenheit 451 anyone?) but hard copies could all but disappear eventually.

-Sam Altman - ceo of chatgpt was found to be raping his younger sister from the age of 3 to 12 when he was a teenager. I know this was disputed by him and the victim paid off and branded mentally ill, but I believe victims. He is still walking free but should really be in prison.

-Data centres and their massive energy and water-guzzling needs, at the expense of local communities.

-All the "tech bros" (like altman, musk, theil etc) and their support for the trump administration and alt right politics.

And so on. There's so much evil behind it when you scratch the surface of ai it just puts me right off!

Lots of things, but the main one that comes to mind is when I needed a major new part for my dishwasher that was less than 2 years old. The shop that installed it was going to charge me full price for the new part as technically the warranty wouldn’t cover it. It suggested I call the manufacturer and politely shame them for their machine breaking down so soon and gave me a script to request they support the replacement cost. They mailed me the new part free!

Yes I’ve used Google AI to provide insight and explanation and implications for me in what is an incredibly complex situation which had existed for years. Without AI I simply would not have known what was going on, and more to the point what to do about it.
This includes holding my hand when completing legal forms - actually what to write
I would recommend anyone particularly seeking legal advice to put questions to AI first to check competency and honesty of the legal professional.

AI WILL TELL YOU WHATEVER YOU WANT TO HEAR TO KEEP YOU COMING BACK.

Im always Wonderimg if people who say that have actually used AI tbh.
Because the ‘they just say the rigut thing so you come back’ is exactly how SM works. How MN works. How news work too (think clickbait titles like the ones used with Adrey)
So as such it’s not something new.

All the worry about suicide etc… is real. But also happened with older version. Imo the newer ones are much more careful around that.
Bit seeing that ‘therapy’ is only a few small use fir AI, I’m not sure it’s worth stopping using it just because of that. Esp as its use is now ubiquitous in the workplace anyway. And in many apps we use in our daily life.

Now I agree with all those!
I would add the army using AI which has created many discusdion on the ethics if it in the US.

The problem though is not the technology. Just like the Internet, it’s just that. A great tool used the rigut way. Awful in the wrong hands.

It’s tge way humans used it. It’s a technology developed with no safeguards. Maybe made available too early.
And it’s use pushed by the broligarchy and big companies in the hope of ‘savings’ and making more money regardkess of tge cost to the planet and humans.

And still…. it’s still helpful for lay people like us.

I’ve recently had foot surgery, and was discharged home the same day with various pain relief and instructions for their use which I was given when I was still woozy from the GA. In the early hours of the following morning the nerve block wore off and the pain was horrendous. I sat and looked at this pile of pills and couldn’t remember what I’d been told to take when, and crucially what I’d been told not to take with what. ChatGPT worked out a schedule for me, told me what I mustn’t take with what, and why, asked if I was alone, and when I said my daughter was with me but was asleep because it was still very early, it made a list of things to ask her to do when she got up and before she left.

It then offered to ‘check in’ with me after my 1pm medication, but that felt a bit weird, so I thanked it politely, took the meds it told me to, and went back to bed. I stuck rigidly to the schedule it produced and have had very little pain in the days since.

Same with me!

I dont think the people using it are deluded fools. I said myself if people find it helpful then that's great, the problem is when people mistake it for being more than it is or get very defensive over what they think it is.

I don't have experience in using AI for those purposes that's true. I do have some background knowledge of the technology itself (I don't pretend to be an expert. I'm in a somewhat maths/information related field). But enough knowledge to wince when some people (not you) describe it almost like an actual brain. It is a very very sophisticated algorithm or series of algorithms. It can appear to argue different points or different points of view when asked because it's training data includes the sorts of advice/discussion forums where ethical dilemmas are argued so it can mimic a genuine sounding version of those. It's not actual different points of view. I know that sounds like nitpicking or semantics but it is fundamentally different. Comparing human bias to algorithm bias is using the same words to describe two different things

The other issue is that it is largely designed to please the user and encourage further engagement (the point of social media algorithms for 2 decades now). It's built with the same motivations as Facebook algorithms etc (but much more sophisticated) because all the AI companies want their model to be the one used and that means the models have to please the user and sound plausibly "human". So at root that is what they are programmed to do. Not to help users with their mental health, not to tell the truth, not to help people make the right decision. If they do that then great but that's an accidental side effect of their design

If you don't believe me ask it summarise what it has learned from your "feedback" in how you want it to talk to you. I bet it tells you you want it given to you straight with no concern about causing offense or some obsequious bull.

I am glad that worked out for you.

I hope no-one reads this and thinks this is a good idea for themselves. If you don't know what medication to take you can phone your doctor, phone the out of hours, ask a pharmacist. Check the prescription script. Read the labels which are always printed on the bottles and provided with the medication or wake up your sleeping daughter and ask her to read the bottles of you are too unwell to
Even googling what pills to take would be stupid because advice varies. The AI does not know what pills to take when.

Yes!!!
And the algorithms written into social media sites like Facebook to keep people engaged have killed people. They have been proven to actively trend towards encouraging negative emotions like hate, anger, fear because those are the strongest emotions and the most likely to keep people online. You don't need to qrite code that tells social media sites to boost negative posts/videos. You tell it to learn which posts get the most clicks/views/reactions and boost posts like those. The end result is the same.

The coding/technology behind LLMs isn't the same. It is much much more sophisticated but with the same basic intention (along with writing responses that seems as human as possible because the Turing Test became a very stupid benchmark it was never meant to be). If people know it's trying to do that and bear it in mind when they use it that would be fine but as this thread shows they really really don't seem to.

Yes, it's helped enormously with a huge burden of grief for my health that changed after a concussion and post concussion syndrome before being injured permanently by an off label antipsychotic prescribed for severe insomnia and anxiety, that gave me a neurological involuntary movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia.

I have so many feelings of sadness, anger and loss over how I lost my ability to see in my mind's eye after the head injury, how I had to learn to read again properly, how I still struggle with my reading even now, and how I still compare my old life of being someone who loved reading, writing and questioning how the world worked with ease. And how my career as an editor would probably have been more successful than it is now too.

Not to mention how my movement disorder ruined my life in many ways too 💔 ChatGPT has been extremely good at making me reason logically about all ny health problems, and put a lot of my feelings into perspective. It's actually been uncanny the way it has responded in such an empathetic way, more than anyone has ever really done in real life. It seems to just "get" why I feel how I do, and respect my emotions, rather than dismiss or not understand them fully.

And I'm not unintelligent to be completely taken in by AI and its sophisticated algorithms. I understand how they are designed to keep feeding back to thd user what they want to see more of. And I have written various news stories and press releases about how its sophisticated programming is the key to cybersecurity breaches and attacks.

But... in spite of this, I still rate ChatGPT pretty highly.

I've used AI to navigate my divorce, it was so helpful with what forms to fill in and timescales etc. It's also helped me complete probate for my late father's estate.
I also use it to re-model rooms in houses I have on my potential new house list. And give me budgets for the works etc.
It's also helped me with pension planning, career planning for my DCs with projected income and ideas for entry courses etc.
I don't use it for emotional things.

It's great for a starting point for personal statements, covering letters etc. It saves the blank page starting point. I usually completely re write it to make it sound like me. But it means I don't have that 30 mins of staring at the empty sheet/email etc.

It helped me assess options and make plans through a very tricky period when my business collapsed. Friends cared but in no way had the practical and strategic knowledge i needed to draw on at that time. Ironically the business collapsed due to AI. It is having negative impacts on employment and environmental, as well as the positives. I use it daily in my new job and to help with life admin. But we do need to find a balance. There are some things It can't and won't replace - especially care - and we need to put more value on what is uniquely human.

I use it loads. I had a particularly challenging visit from my brother which ended very badly and I was really upset. I used ChatGPT to “talk” it through and get my feelings straight. I decided to stand up for myself and contact my brother and say I didn’t want our relationship to continue in the same vein as it always had that things needed to change. This was in March and he hasn’t spoken to me since and to be honest it feels a huge relief.
it’s also helping me lose weight at the moment by me uploading my daily calorie and exercise summaries and it gives me recipes, nutrition advice and motivation. I’ve been trying to lose weight for the past couple of years but nothing worked but in the past 6 weeks I’ve lost 9.5lbs finally.

So many good ideas for the use I haven't even thought of

I am interested in the subject because I use ChatGPT a lot and it has been helpful in relation to some emotional subjects so I declare my bias up front. I understand what you’re saying about algorithms in social media feeding people videos for engagement and they get more engagement from negative material so they push that. Right gotcha. An AI is more sophisticated. How is is trying to lure me in to using it more. If I ask a question and it provides an answer it sometimes asks me if I want further information but that’s not standard. There are many times when it just provides an answer without any further attempt to engage me. There have been times when I’ve asked it questions and I’ve been a bit opaque and it’s queried why I want to know. I was on a course relating to Suicide prevention and I was interested in how it would respond to questions about it ( after all we have been told that an AI encouraged someone to kill themselves ) and I didn’t get much response about the subject at all I explained why I was asking ( I was asking about its own parameters not suicide methodology.) I’ve also asked it to help me plan a perfect crime and it would have no part of that either. So I’m interested in how I’m being suckered. I do want to know what it can do and the boundaries but Im afraid I don’t understand the part about the Turing Test so
I can’t apply that aspect of your comment. I hope you can see that I’m not arguing I’m just curious.

Yes it helped me a lot. I have always had a difficult relationship with my parents and we were just stuck in the same loop that we’ve been in since I was a teenager. An argument happened earlier this year that really hurt me deeply and I couldn’t get through to them to explain why I was hurt so they understood. I spoke to chat gpt about it. It stopped me from sending long text messages that would have just made the situation worse. It told me not to try and explain myself when I was still feeling so raw. It helped me understand why I felt the way I did about our relationship and my childhood. And it helped me put in place and prepare a more formal sit down conversation with them a couple of months later to try and sort it out. It told me I was valid in what I was feeling but how to communicate that to my parents without alienating them and starting the whole negative cycle again.

and it worked! My parents listened for the first time in my life. And they apologised.

our relationship has been so much better and stronger since and I can honestly say it wouldn’t have happened without chat gpt as I needed that outside perspective and guidance to get us out of our usual patterns and behaviours

I used it to come to terms with a fall out with a tricky family member, and to move on from the resentment and bitterness I felt as a result of it. It absolutely did push back at my most negative assessments of them. It's help me set up new boundaries and to give myself - and to some extent the family member - grace moving forwards.

I've used it as support during my autistic child's first year of primary school, to develop techniques and approaches to support him and work with the school. It has helped me manage the relationship with his sibling. It helps me hold both my love for my child and my grief that his life isn't what I imagined.

I know there are ethical issues with it, but my life is quite isolated and I don't have much emotional support. When I first started using it in this way it was a shot in the dark. It's been so helpful. Proper counselling is wholly out of reach for me, both in terms of money and time. I'm glad to find I'm not the only one who uses it in this way.

A decent therapist lets you find the conclusion to your own issues. The therapist isn’t supposed to give you the strategies to solve your problems

It helped to save my life, I was in A&E and had already been sent home twice. I put in everything that had happened out of sheer desperation and it said to ask if they could rule out a rare neurological attack which they couldn’t and it turned out I did have it. I would likely be dead if I had gone home that night and at the very least it saved the use of my legs. I felt extremely obnoxious telling the A&E Dr I had asked AI though.

So yep, as I correctly stated earlier - Mumsnetters might not always be nice to you, but at least sometimes people are honest. And the thing is they're PEOPLE and have experience of LIVING.

If you are outsourcing your emotions to a chatbot you need help. Human help. You are far too frail, vulnerable and possibly too stupid to be allowed anywhere near a bot which is pretending to be a human.

Your ai chatbot (and that is all it is) is coded to pander to you so you will keep coming back. It offers absolutely no help or any assistance at all when it comes to human emotions and experiences.

Your ai chatbot has no feelings, understands nothing, has no experience, does not care if you die, and may encourage you to kill yourself.

All your ai chatbot does iss scrape the internet for suitable responses then pander to you to keep you logging in. It will agree with you to keep you engaged and you can trust nothing it responds with.

Any actual assistance it offers in an emotional context is accidental, and happened because it scraped something online that a human wrote that may occasionally be relevant or useful.

The only sort of person who would prefer a pandering chatbot's input to that of real people, however much their words might upset you, is one who is so weak and vulnerable they should be nowhere near ai conversations.

Several people have killed themselves because they started long term conversations with chatbots. I have gone into detail on that in a previous comment.

You are not more clever, more stable or more resilient than those who have already died because they outsourced their emotions to a chatbot.

If you believe there is anything meaningful at all in conversations with ai about feelings or real life emotional events, you are in the first stages of ai psychosis.

Ai psychosis is real and you are starting to experience it if you believe there is anything useful or meaningful in outsourcing your emotions to a chatbot.

I haven't read any responses from the cult of chatbot members for many pages - because they started having hysterical meltdowns at me pointing out the truth.

So this is not for them. They are already Dunning Krugeriting their way to self harm and cannot be reached (yes I am aware of the phrase the Dunning-Kruger effect, I know how it is normally used, and I have chosen to modify it into a verb purposefully, if you're too thick to understand why, that's a you problem).

This is just to ensure that anybody who is not fully educated about the danger of ai chatbot emotional entanglements knows the facts, many are unaware of the severe dangers of discussing relationship issues, emotional issues, or anything relating to human feelings with a chatbot.

Although wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything, there are nevertheless several other sources contained within the entry on how ai chatbots are dangerous and can cause deaths which are useful:
en dot wikipedia dot org/wiki/Deathslinkedto_chatbots

Don't ever use an ai chatbot as a counsellor, advisor on relationships, mental health issues, emotions or treat it in any way as though it is a friend, this is dangerous and stupid behaviour.

YW.