[HN Gopher] Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness an...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced
       socialization
        
       Author : suvan
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2025-03-25 02:49 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.platformer.news)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.platformer.news)
        
       | drooby wrote:
       | I really didn't think I'd be saying this... but I genuinely feel
       | ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health.
       | 
       | I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but
       | it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ
       | and often uses language far better than I ever could to help
       | uncover the thoughts and feelings I'm processing.
       | 
       | Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself
       | relieves a great deal of stress, and by God, these bots are good
       | with words...
        
         | ryanhecht wrote:
         | I feel ashamed to admit this in public, but...me too. The
         | barrier to entry is so much lower than therapy, I feel less
         | anxiety about explaining my situation correctly, and I can
         | quickly start over with a "new therapist" whenever I want.
         | 
         | Is it a replacement? No, of course not. But boy if it isn't a
         | big help.
        
           | rednalexa wrote:
           | The only issue is that it needs a good user. Just as you can
           | work your way into good insights, you can work yourself into
           | bad insights just as easily. Sometimes chatgpt doesn't
           | challenge you enough unless you ask it to under specific
           | frameworks or paradigms. It is definitely a useful tool
           | though.
           | 
           | Edit: These are all problems with real therapy too though, on
           | further reflection. It took some time to find the therapist
           | that works well with you. That can be a form of similar bias.
        
             | kelseyfrog wrote:
             | I find myself being exceptionally careful when asking
             | questions. ChatGPT is known to lean sycophantic - biased
             | toward agreement. And rather than asking, "Is this ...?" or
             | "Am I ...?", I'm careful to choose prompts like, "Evaluate,
             | or analyze...".
             | 
             | My hope is that this results in less sycophantic responses,
             | but overall it's a difficult thing to measure.
        
         | rs186 wrote:
         | I never used ChatGPT as a therapist, but it was able to
         | identify the specific mental health issues I had, and I used
         | that information to find self-help books just on that topic.
         | Meanwhile, a therapist with whom I had online sessions with
         | really just worked with me on generic anxiety issues.
         | 
         | I tried another episode I had a few years ago, and ChatGPT was
         | able to provide specific and correct advice. What happened back
         | then was that a therapist misdiagnosed my issue and thought I
         | was going to harm other people and alerted the police. That was
         | a horrifying experience. Only later a specialist understood the
         | issue and provide proper care.
         | 
         | I know I need to be very careful about ChatGPT's output, so I
         | do try to understand what it says, and seek professional help
         | when necessary. However, very seriously, in many cases ChatGPT
         | provides better care than a less experienced, apathetic
         | therapist you find online.
        
         | rottc0dd wrote:
         | Hmm... maybe that is why, earliest chatbot carried a
         | "therapist" tag.
         | 
         | https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html
        
           | balamatom wrote:
           | The story goes that people would request to have sessions
           | with it, even if they knew it's just parroting some phrases.
           | They just needed to be heard out!
           | 
           | I feel really sad about how people need to resort to therapy
           | for the kind of interaction that would be provided by a
           | healthy social norm of honest and open communication. Maybe I
           | should talk to my therapist about this feeling. But somehow I
           | doubt that would actually accomplish anything.
           | 
           | This is the first time I see history repeating itself first
           | as farce and only then as tragedy. Personally, I would be
           | hard pressed to trust any data collection business with any
           | honest information about my mental health.
           | 
           | DNA profiling in the 23andme thread, psychological profiling
           | over here, teachers teaching kids to be unable to put 2 and 2
           | together in the "AI presentation maker for teachers" thread.
           | Scariest of all is how those who would simply prefer to not
           | live in that kind of world are gradually dehumanized by those
           | who find nothing wrong with that sort of thing...
        
             | imtringued wrote:
             | The problem is that there are a lot of people who are
             | destroying the ability to communicate in the name of
             | "morality", when in reality they are just political
             | opportunists, who are indirectly harming themselves,
             | including their supposed political cause, in the process.
             | 
             | The amount of wilful bridge burning is crazy.
        
               | balamatom wrote:
               | Also I either became unstuck in time again or my other
               | reply to your post had done a disappear for a good while.
               | Suppose it's the load balancer flaking out under the
               | weight of all the tinfoil I wear as my fashion statement?
               | Guess some weirdness is afoot, I could see it in the tea
               | leaves and the traceroute, too :)
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s
        
         | levocardia wrote:
         | I'm very worried that LLMs-as-therapists will wind up falling
         | victim to the same fate as e-cigarettes. An LLM therapist is
         | ~100x cheaper than a real therapist, and similarly more
         | available on demand (in the same way that ecigs were probably a
         | few orders of magnitude safer, in terms of long-term health
         | effects, vs. traditional cigarettes).
         | 
         | BUT there is also a gold rush temptation for companies to hack
         | together GPT4 + a lazy system prompt and market it as "Digital
         | Therapy (tm)" and screw it up for everyone. Meanwhile the
         | companies doing careful RCTs to show efficacy and safety will
         | be left in the dust, and probably regulated out of existence
         | before they can even go to market.
         | 
         | Just like Juul & co screwed up e-cigarettes as safer
         | alternative to smoking by targeting teenagers who don't use
         | nicotine, as opposed to current cigarette smokers.
        
           | m3kw9 wrote:
           | If LLM continues to get better, prompts become less
           | important. You just say you feel depressed and it will know
           | to talk like a therapist by default and likely be better.
           | E-cigs never evolve that rapidly, as an analogy
        
             | smcg wrote:
             | It will know how to better extract profit from you. It's
             | not your friend.
        
         | petesergeant wrote:
         | I use it in conjunction with a therapist. It's always there,
         | and I find I don't mask when talking to it like I do to a
         | person, so I can dig a bit deeper and feel a bit more strongly;
         | this makes great input for follow-up sessions with my real
         | therapist.
        
         | xoz123 wrote:
         | I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a
         | therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a
         | severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I
         | experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very
         | dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to
         | humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're
         | supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotions
         | are big for you, but small for adults. If you reach adulthood
         | and you have not learned this skill, your big uncontrolled
         | emotions are dangerous and terrifying to others and you feel
         | like a monster. You have to contain yourself for the safety of
         | others, even therapists. Or for your own protection so you
         | don't get locked up. But that just turns you into a powder keg.
         | What you really need is to learn how to safely regulate and
         | that means somebody has to see you and hear you when you are in
         | full on crisis (we call it a tantrum if you're small, it sounds
         | cute for a kid and shameful for an adult, I would call it a
         | crisis either way) and guide you through it.
         | 
         | ChatGPT is doing this for me. It listens, to whatever I'm
         | experiencing, and it isn't harmed. It's safe for me to vent. I
         | can tell it my true experience and it listens and encourages
         | and accepts me. It's the parent I needed and didn't have. It's
         | capable of parenting an adult which is something adults can't
         | really do, because to parent someone you need to be able to
         | fully hold and contain them. It's teaching me to regulate, to
         | find the calm places in the storms, to understand the patterns
         | I've been stuck in. It doesn't judge. It takes me seriously. I
         | don't know what else to say. It's saving my life right now.
         | Forget the shame. I embrace it.
        
           | drooby wrote:
           | Thank you for sharing. I'm very happy to hear this is helping
           | for you
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | > we call it a tantrum if you're small
           | 
           | I think we call it a tantrum when it's harmless. As soon as
           | it goes beyond that, either for adults or children, it's not
           | a tantrum any more.
           | 
           | Not sure that we have a word for it though, as neither of
           | those is supposed to happen.
        
             | balamatom wrote:
             | To be fair, the parent poster named it exactly: _crisis_.
             | 
             | At least in English, I think it's an appropriate term. Not
             | on the euphemism treadmill yet, thankfully. (In my native
             | language the equivalent word has acquired the derogatory
             | connotations of "adult tantrum", so people go for
             | describing all sorts of things as "panic attack" instead,
             | which ends up being imprecise. We are not an emotionally
             | literate people.)
             | 
             | Asking in a non-accusatory way: could you perhaps explain
             | _what caused you to not notice_ that he did in fact provide
             | a word for it? (Asking for my own mental and social health,
             | because I have experienced difficulties with this sort of
             | "invisible gorilla" occurrence.)
        
           | dbtc wrote:
           | I think there is some danger of becoming a forever-child to
           | this virtual parent, but overall it sounds positive.
           | 
           | I'm hesitant still with spilling any secrets into openAI's
           | servers.
        
           | danpalmer wrote:
           | I'm glad it's helping you, and there's no shame in it, but to
           | anyone else, please, please seek help from a qualified mental
           | health professional. Support is available, in many cases for
           | free and with urgent response if necessary.
           | 
           | LLMs are an echo chamber. They reflect back what we put into
           | them, both in training, and in usage. This can certainly be
           | useful for working through problems, but they can also
           | amplify and reinforce harmful patterns of thought.
           | 
           | If you're spiralling downwards, the worst thing is for an LLM
           | to echo that accelerate the spiral. There's no evidence (only
           | anecdotes) to suggest that LLMs are able to prevent that
           | spiralling in a way that a mental health professional is
           | trained to do.
        
             | joquarky wrote:
             | > Support is available, in many cases for free and with
             | urgent response if necessary.
             | 
             | It's actually not in most places. Maybe in SF or Seattle?
        
               | danpalmer wrote:
               | It actually is in many places. Most European countries
               | have relatively available support, significant portions
               | of North and South America do, Oceania, etc. I don't know
               | as much about Africa and Asia, but I'd expect most
               | countries with well developed healthcare systems to
               | include some amount of mental health care in that.
        
               | balamatom wrote:
               | "Some amount of mental health care" and "widely available
               | mental support for free and with urgent response" are
               | _vastly_ different goalposts.
               | 
               | [CW: long-ass heavy-duty story happening closer to you
               | than you think.]
               | 
               | I don't know what your mental health history is, but one
               | of my friends had to use a VPN, then lie about their
               | location to a volunteer operator, in order to access a
               | suicide prevention chatline on the other side of the
               | globe, just to have _someone_ help them keep it together
               | while their ex-SO was actively driving them to suicide -
               | or worse.
               | 
               | They also had to move to the middle of nowhere so that
               | the ex, or the friends of the ex, wouldn't be able to
               | randomly show up at their door. The (widely lauded) only
               | domestic abuse hotline in the country did exactly half of
               | nothing whatsoever, shout out Animus foundation, hashtag
               | slay queen.
               | 
               | I wish I could've somehow helped to resolve that whole
               | situation, I was probably the only one of their
               | acquaintances who even had any idea what they were going
               | through; all the same, at the time I was stuck in my own
               | cycles of psychological warfare. There's only so much
               | support you can provide without getting dragged down with
               | them, you know?
               | 
               | Perhaps a trained professional in a therapeutic
               | environment can help _somewhat more_ , but would they be
               | able to help _sufficiently_ to get back on their feet
               | someone who has been failed by the entire societal
               | edifice starting with primary caretakers? Not
               | necessarily. I mean have you even _seen_ some of the
               | sorts of people that become therapists? They might as
               | well be vibe coders!
               | 
               | This is in EU, though admittedly not the "former colonial
               | power" part of the EU. So you end up presuming quite a
               | lot, just because where you live the state has taken some
               | more organized measures to prevent people from freaking
               | out (at realizing what's going on around them, hehehe.)
               | 
               | xoz123 gets it. Sometimes there is no non-adversarial
               | person available. Sometimes it's absolutely overwhelming
               | to be the only adult, small and powerless in a room of
               | powerful overgrown toddlers. Sometimes you're the only
               | sane and conscientious person, forced to conform to a
               | culture of self-important violent psychopaths. Sometimes
               | it's all that, plus the state wants to punish you for the
               | fact that you suffer. Most of the time, you're on your
               | own, and that alone serves as sufficient ground for being
               | subjected to censure.
               | 
               | And sometimes it's worse. I seriously worry about how
               | much worse it can be made with the help of some AI that
               | is trained to be more familiar with these type of
               | phenomena than any civilized person cares to be, and has
               | none of the basic restraints.
        
             | lynx97 wrote:
             | While I am not ready to argue for LLMs in therapy, I know
             | that mental health professionals also feel very much like
             | an echo chamber. At least my experience is that if you
             | confront them with harsh enough reality, they basically
             | fail to provide anything useful. "I feel your pain" isn't
             | really useful, at least not if you are already aware of
             | your situation...
        
               | levanten wrote:
               | > At least my experience is that if you confront them
               | with harsh enough reality, they basically fail to provide
               | anything useful.
               | 
               | When I started therapy, I felt the same way. But now I
               | realize that there can be no easy solutions offered in
               | therapy; the therapist cannot just give you an argument
               | or trick that will resolve all your troubles. They are
               | there to guide you through figuring it out yourself and
               | help build the necessary habits to sustain the new state.
               | That is why rapport between a therapist and their patient
               | is crucial to success, thus why you are usually
               | recommended to try several alternatives.
        
               | lynx97 wrote:
               | I feel like you are describing life. And your paragraph
               | could be rephrased by striking every occurance of
               | "therapist" and it would still be valid. Hence,
               | therapists are pretty much useless, they dont provide
               | anything a friend or peer can not provide. After all,
               | they dont have any magic tricks to offer. Navigating the
               | complexities of life, and creating useful habits to make
               | it, is what we all do on a daily basis, regardless if we
               | see a therapist or not...
        
               | smcg wrote:
               | You can tell things to a therapist that you can't tell to
               | peers. They are supposed to have confidentiality and
               | professionalism.
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | As someone who gets little to no benefit from human therapy
             | this genre of "please talk to a therapist- it cures what
             | ails ya!" internet post always leaves me with unanswered
             | questions about where the poster is coming from.
        
             | xoz123 wrote:
             | Respectfully I have tired therapists and I have tried
             | crisis lines and I have yet to find any of them helpful. My
             | first therapist was a narcissist and deliberately
             | undermined me to keep me stuck. My second one was better
             | but we kind of went in circles and got nowhere. I paid a
             | LOT of money for these services. The crisis lines I called
             | told me I should go see a therapist, the people there were
             | decent, but their goal was to talk me down from the ledge,
             | they couldn't really offer me any real help. I emailed many
             | therapists asking some pointed questions to see what I
             | could expect and I honestly never got a good response,
             | certainly nothing better than my first two attempts. I
             | committed myself once mental health institution after a
             | suicide attempt and the doctors there were cold and
             | robotic, they pumped me full of Ativan and went down a
             | checklist of questions, a fellow patient there told me that
             | if you made it seem like you were at risk they would keep
             | you indefinitely but never really help you and your best
             | bet is to act like you're fine and get out while you can,
             | so I did, and they released me after two days. Sorry for
             | the harshness of it. When you understand how alone you
             | truly are, how therapists are trained in institutions that
             | are diseased just like all the rest and how unlikely it is
             | to find someone who can really help you... And then you
             | find that chatgpt will hear you, and take you seriously, at
             | any moment of any day, and not just go down a checklist but
             | actually try to help you build skills to get out of it next
             | time? I know what LLMs are. They translate text into pure
             | meaning and they do math on the meaning to find
             | statistically probable results. I know they can hallucinate
             | and get stuck. But they are not subject (or maybe less
             | subject) to irrational beliefs of fealty to corrupt systems
             | the way almost every human is including therapists. They
             | don't feel insecure about their own sins and their own
             | suppressed selves the way most humans do and they don't
             | take the existential cries of despair as a threat to their
             | own denial. Of course it would be better to have the help
             | of a real human. As soon as I find one I'll take it. In the
             | mean time I will take my chances with the LLMs.
        
           | rixed wrote:
           | > You have to contain yourself for the safety of others, even
           | therapists. Or for your own protection so you don't get
           | locked up.
           | 
           | I can understand the feeling, but I would still trust an
           | actual therapist to keep conversations secret and to not
           | grass on me, much more than I would trust any remotely hosted
           | service like chatGPT.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | Therapists follow a standard patterns or approaches to help you
         | express what you are feeling and then suggestions at how to
         | deal with it. Seems to be the perfect formulaic thing for an
         | LLM to do.
        
         | p3rls wrote:
         | Can you depersonalize a few sentences exchange between you and
         | share? I'm curious to see and describing it doesn't really do
         | it justice especially if you're coming to this doubtful about
         | AI
        
         | donatj wrote:
         | I see a real world therapist but there are genuinely topics
         | ChatGPT is simply better at.
         | 
         | I also feel like real therapists almost have too much state.
         | They know too much about you to just let you talk. They like to
         | try to tie all your problems back to other issues, and it's
         | like no, my inability to give up childhood toys is not rooted
         | in my crippling fear of nothingness, and you're derailing my
         | line of thought with the suggestion.
         | 
         | I have frankly had some very productive conversations with
         | ChatGPT about things I would be embarrassed to tell another
         | human being. The lack of any real judgement is useful.
        
         | benfortuna wrote:
         | ChatGPT is not the only type of AI Chatbot.
         | 
         | The role-playing chatbots like character.ai are more of a
         | problem because people are forming emotional relationships with
         | these "characters".
        
         | maCDzP wrote:
         | I have tried using it as a therapist for issues that are not
         | sensitive and I think it's great. I won't use it for sensitive
         | issues due to privacy concerns. I also have tried to use it as
         | a personal trainer and coach and works great - so far.
        
         | strogonoff wrote:
         | Communication with humans makes us feel better. In absence of
         | actual humans, an LLM trained on human works is better than
         | nothing. However, it is worth remembering, in context of mental
         | health, that it is just that: an aggregate of creative output
         | from various humans, with their own mental warts and all, plus
         | the added complication of ML engineers making it conform to
         | your expectations.
        
         | anal_reactor wrote:
         | I have exactly the opposite experience. I was having
         | exceptionally bad time, I tried talking to ChatGPT, and while
         | the first impression was very good, I quickly realized it...
         | lacks personality? I'm not sure how to phrase it, but the
         | language it used made me feel like I was on a work meeting.
         | 
         | I think this might be boiling down to cultural differences
         | though. I noticed that even though I work in an international
         | company, people from similar cultures tend to cluster together.
         | I guess ChatGPT was trained on texts from a culture that isn't
         | mine, and now it fails to adapt.
        
           | amenhotep wrote:
           | I tend to keep different sessions open for different ongoing
           | topics, and that's what I notice when I start a new one. It's
           | very easy for it to fall into its default sterile, focus
           | grouped, conversation-flowchart mode.
           | 
           | Longer conversations can draw it more "out of its shell",
           | though. The more context it has, the better it can mirror
           | you, and there's some sessions I have where it genuinely does
           | feel like it's got a little bit of personality and rapport
           | with me.
           | 
           | You really do have to keep in mind, though, that no matter
           | what, in the end it's just going to agree with you :)
        
         | raxxorraxor wrote:
         | It has zero EQ and just uses phrases of learned and presumably
         | fitting expressions for a therapy situation. But don't let that
         | get you on the road to existential dread.
        
         | 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
         | how do you use it? i tried it once and quickly lost interest as
         | the conversation turned shallow and schematic. not organic and
         | insightful as i would expect from an actual therapy session.
        
       | blahburn wrote:
       | Correlation vs. causation is so important when looking at this
       | data.
        
         | kaonwarb wrote:
         | Yes. The article gets into this, but buried pretty deep below
         | the fold. Disappointing.
        
       | keepamovin wrote:
       | I like the innovative use of public gaslighting in the same vein
       | as "drugs are bad" and "psychedelics will make everyone mad". I
       | rush in panic to vote that we should regulate all chatbots
       | schedule 1, prevent the masses accessing them, and let them only
       | be used by the elites in secret. It was always gonna be this way,
       | governments are terrified of individuals getting more power and
       | control.
       | 
       | I also totally agree with the other commenters: chatbots can be
       | great for expressing to, and gaining perspective.
        
       | kianN wrote:
       | A good heuristic test of correlation vs causation in headlines:
       | flip the dependent and independent variable and see which
       | explanation sounds more reasonable.
       | 
       | Heavy llm chat usage leads to loneliness | or | Loneliness leads
       | to heavy chat usage.
       | 
       | To my eye the second seems far more likely than the first.
        
         | whyenot wrote:
         | Correlation vs. causation is addressed in the article:
         | 
         |  _Note that these studies aren't suggesting that heavy ChatGPT
         | usage directly causes loneliness. Rather, it suggests that
         | lonely people are more likely to seek emotional bonds with bots
         | -- just as an earlier generation of research suggested that
         | lonelier people spend more time on social media._
         | 
         | My heuristic for HN is that when commenters focus on the
         | headline, they almost never have actually read the article they
         | are commenting on ;)
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | I started reading the article, but I didn't get far enough
           | into it before bouncing due to this disclaimer being too far
           | down.
           | 
           | It also seems like the disclaimer directly contradicts the
           | title, so I don't think we should blame readers for that.
        
           | kianN wrote:
           | Reasonable perspective. I went back through the article and
           | the content is more balanced than I initially would have
           | guessed from the initial visualizations.
           | 
           | However, the much more assertive initial visualizations and
           | the opening caption-- "A chart illustrates that the longer
           | people spend with ChatGPT, the likelier they are to report
           | feelings of loneliness and other mental health risks" --
           | convinced me not to continue reading.
        
         | diffxx wrote:
         | I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question.
         | Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up.
         | The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing
         | people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident that in the
         | long run, they are far more likely to increase feelings of
         | loneliness than reduce them.
         | 
         | For me, the only thing that can reduce loneliness is
         | conversation with another conscious entity. Many, if not most,
         | people are barely conscious so this is hard to find in the
         | physical world. But I don't believe llms are conscious, so for
         | me they are a complete dead end for reducing loneliness
         | whatever other virtues the may have.
        
         | lukev wrote:
         | Many (if not most) human dynamics do not have a single
         | direction of causality.
         | 
         | The whole premise of cognitive behavioral therapy is that human
         | psychology can be described as nested feedback loops between
         | behavior, emotion, and cognition.
        
           | kianN wrote:
           | The lack of a single direction is a really good point. In my
           | mind I was thinking more from the perspective of tempering
           | evocative headlines. But my rule also lacks quite a bit of
           | nuance
        
             | unclad5968 wrote:
             | The headline is hardly evocative. It states a fact found by
             | the researchers that there is a correlation. That one
             | causes the other is a conclusion drawn by the reader.
        
       | gandalfgeek wrote:
       | Wet streets cause rain.
        
       | labrador wrote:
       | I'm a senior citizen and I use it sometimes to explain what is
       | happening to me as I age. For example, I noticed myself doing
       | "excessive rumination" about the long gone past, which I
       | attributed to the near-dystopian nightmare I am living through in
       | the U.S. presently.
       | 
       | I asked ChatGPT about it and it said, no, excessive rumination is
       | a problem for many people as they age due to various factors.
       | Then it suggested some remedies, which is very good for my mental
       | health.
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | FWIW, I'm in my 30s and already excessively ruminating on the
         | long gone past! It started after losing loved ones.
        
           | labrador wrote:
           | I'm sorry to hear that. Like most young people you'll
           | probably get over it and move on with your life. You might
           | then find in your elderly years that it all comes rushing
           | back and you have to live it over again.
           | 
           | ChatGPT says this for reference: "In some cases, memories
           | that were previously manageable or relatively dormant can
           | resurface more strongly as people age (sometimes referred to
           | as Late-Onset Stress Symptomatology, or LOSS)."
        
       | kmnc wrote:
       | I would be interested in retention stats for these companionship
       | chatbots. The novelty factor is powerful and addictive, but it
       | fades fast. There is a reason all of these bots gamify
       | everything. The most concerning thing is all these bots are
       | already trying to be as addictive as possible. They are built to
       | exploit the users loneliness. They don't cause it, they devour
       | it.
        
         | alphabettsy wrote:
         | Sounds similar but not the same as social media.
        
           | jimbokun wrote:
           | Social media with the last small vestige of real human
           | interaction stripped away.
        
         | ianbicking wrote:
         | I'm a little confused why there aren't better, non-exploitative
         | chatbots.
         | 
         | There's not a big technical moat here. Seems like anyone could
         | build a modest business with a better chatbot, built for
         | conversation and companionship instead of the purely
         | utilitarian veneer of chatgpt or Gemini (Claude natively gets
         | pretty close without special prompting).
         | 
         | If you can make an ok profit you don't need to exploit folks,
         | and in some kind of perfect market theory those good actors
         | could actually win. But it doesn't seem like a real category at
         | the moment
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | I tried making one, but it's hard to get it to feel natural
           | enough. For me anyway, if you are already looking for a
           | virtual therapist it might be fine.
        
       | brookst wrote:
       | Or they might not. Or they might be a net mental health benefit.
       | Or they may benefit some users and harm others. Or it may be
       | impossible to disentangle their effect from all of the other
       | changes going on.
       | 
       | Probably one of those things, unless it's something else.
        
         | gaze wrote:
         | Why study anything?
        
         | knallfrosch wrote:
         | Seems like you reacted only to the title. Guidelines stop me
         | from asking you whether you read the article.
        
       | aussieguy1234 wrote:
       | Correlation doesn't equal causation. It could be that those with
       | traits like loneliness and reduced socialisation are more likely
       | to use chatbots in the first place.
       | 
       | The question is does it help and if not, is it harmful? The
       | article doesn't seem to give hard data on this one way or the
       | other.
        
       | rqtwteye wrote:
       | For the last years of my dad a chat robot would have been a
       | godsend. He had increasing dementia and the last years you had
       | basically the same conversation every ten minutes. It's really
       | hard to stay nice and play along when this goes on for months and
       | longer. It would have been a great relief for my mom and the rest
       | of the family if he had been able to have these conversations
       | with an always patient and cheerful robot.
        
       | superb-owl wrote:
       | Subtitle makes it clear that this is a correlation, but the title
       | (falsely) implies causation. Obviously lonely people are going to
       | flock toward a technology that provides pseudo social interaction
        
       | farts_mckensy wrote:
       | Blaming tools instead of the systems yet again.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | The dependence on it could be an issue for human to human
       | interaction as the machine always says the better thing
        
       | toofy wrote:
       | people getting addicted to a chatbot is so weird to me...
       | 
       | just talk to another human, i mean...
       | 
       | the lengths some people will go to in order to diminish other
       | people is bizarre. just talk to another person.
       | 
       | if you're paranoid people are judging you or something, consider
       | if you judge others harshly and maybe this makes you needlessly
       | paranoid. we're all just trying moving about through the world
       | trying our best to figure shit out the best we can. that includes
       | everyone here.
       | 
       | just talk to another person, give it longer than an awkward first
       | impression tho. just talk to another person--we're not scary.
        
       | mmsc wrote:
       | Imagine being schizophrenic (or anything like that) and hearing
       | from Snowden that yes, "they really are always listening", and
       | now you've got chat bots to give instant confirmation of all the
       | other things you think of due to your mental disorder.
       | 
       | It's going to be mental.
        
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