To use chatgtp as my personal therapist

[Danzdanzdanz]

Just that really 🤷‍♀️
I realise that I rely more and more on AI to help me deal with and understand my emotional, psychological, or behavioral issues.
Is this a common practice nowadays or am I an outlier?

As long as you always have in the back of your head that it can give bad or wrong advice and obviously not to put too personal information unless you're happy for it to be read.

Honestly, I struggle with therapy because I often end up having to manage their emotions and moderate my thoughts if they seem to be having a hard day.

I can see why AI would appeal.
No judgement, no worry they will be traumatised by your story, no worrying about overwhelming them.

Just factual and practical advice.

Although, empathy and human emotions are still important to navigate and I do worry with the rise of AI and the internet that we are allowing ourselves to become emotionally stunted because its easier.

Not necessarily factual and possibly dangerous.

It's never occurred to me to use AI for this. Is it a good therapist?!

Yanbu

YABU, sorry. Therapy isn’t just about getting advice - it’s a connection between humans that actually rewires your brain. Chat GPT is no substitute.

ChatGPT is a statistical language model. That means that, for every input you give it, it works out a likely bit of language that a human would say in return. It’s not giving advice. It’s not reacting to the content of what you say. It’s reacting to the patterns in your language. So its responses may not be factually correct; it may give very bad advice; it may respond with language you find hurtful, upsetting, or hard to deal with. Unlike a therapist, ChatGPT cannot help you to work through those feelings. It has no ethical responsibility for your wellbeing, and no ability to recognise that it’s producing language that may be harmful. All it can do is produce language that looks like a human - any human, not a trained therapist - could have said it in that context.

If you’re fully aware of, and happy with, all that, then there are a couple of other things to consider. Are you happy for the company owning ChatGPT to store your conversations with your therapist and use them for further training? Are you comfortable using a tool that is based on industrial-scale plagiarism and content theft? And are you okay with the environmental damage done by the huge energy costs and water consumption of ChatGPT?

You can probably tell from all that what my answer would be for myself - I would never consider using an LLM as a therapist. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t - just be very aware of exactly what an LLM is, how it works, and what the potential pitfalls are.

It’s no different from Googling tbh. I’m now wondering if there are therapist apps out there?!

hmm I never had a connection with my therapist that blackcatstotalyrule describes. I find it easier to share my stories and get advise, suggestions and strategies to try. Also very good to help rationalise something or unpick confusing experiences. Definitely more helpful than nhs talking therapy and no need to wait for appointments!

I think this is the only way I would have "therapy"

YABU to use ChatGPT at all.

Given the often terrible but always variable quality of the advice that real people post here, I wouldn’t be setting much store by the sort of advice a bot can scrape from the internet with no human quality control involved.

Spoiler alert
This concept of AI as therapist was central to the storyline of the Disney plus drama Strangers At The End of the World (or something v similar to that) with Emma Corrin.

Hmm, probably no worse than using mumsnet for therapy, which plenty of people do!

I love Chat GPT and had some really useful chats on there when my Mum died.