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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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
I don’t think there’s harm in allowing people who would never be able to afford life-saving medicine to have life-saving medicine cat-puzzle-feeder style
Edit: this was me and access hasn’t changed the fact that I do no generally derive value from it.
You realize that adds up to 60% right?
math moment
40 40 10 10
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
Care to elaborate?
It’s an oversimplified statement from someone (sorry I don’t have the source) and I’m not exactly an AI expert but my understanding is the current commercial AI products are nowhere near the “think and judge like a human” definition. They can scrape the internet for information and use it to react to prompts and can do a fantastic job to imitate humans, but the technology is simply not there.
The technology for human intelligence? Any technology would be always very different from human intelligence. What you probably are referring to is AGI, that is defined as artificial general intelligence, which is an “intelligent” agent that doesn’t excel in anything, but is able to handle a huge variety of scenarios and tasks, such as humans.
LLM are specialized models to generate fluent text, but very different from autocompletes because can work with concepts, semantics and (pretty surprisingly) with rather complex logic.
As oversimplification even humans are fancy autocomplete. They are just different, as LLMs are different.
I won’t trust a tech company with my most intimate secrets. Human therapists won’t get fully replaced by ai
AI cannot think, it does not logic or reason. It outputs a result from an input prompt. That will not solve psychological problems.
It’s what AI does at the moment. Which may not necessarily be true in a few years, what’s what OP is asking about.
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.
Hey, maybe your back ground in psychology will help with unfucking an errant LLM or actual AI someday :P
I think it is one of these things that AI can’t make redundant, never.
AI won’t do psychology redundant. Might allow for an easier and broader access to low level psychological first support.
What is more likely to make psychological consultants a risky investment is the economic crisis. People are already prioritizing food over psychological therapy. Psychological therapy unfortunately is nowadays a “luxury item”.
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
Many valid points here, but here is a slightly different perspective. Let’s say for the sake of discussion AI is somehow disruptive here. So?
You cannot predict what will happen in this very fast space. You should not attempt to do so in a way that compromises your path toward your interests.
If you like accounting or art or anything else that AI may disrupt… so what? Do it because you are interested. It may be hyper important to have people that did so in any given field no matter how unexpected. And most importantly, doing what interest you is always at least part of a good plan.
Here’s a case study for you: An eating disorder hotline got rid of the humans in favor of an AI chatbot. Lasted less than a week before it was giving horrible advice.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/31/eating-disorder-hotline-union-ai-chatbot-harm
Psychology will be controlled by humans, probably forever.
It’s definitely possible, but such an AI would probably be good enough to take over every other field too. So it’s not like you can avoid it by choosing something else anyway.
And the disruption would be large enough that governments will have to react in some way.
If you’re going to avoid psychology, do it because of the replication crisis. What is being called “AI” should play no role on that. Here’s why.
Let us suppose for a moment that some AI 7y from now is able to accurately diagnose and treat psychological issues that someone might have. Even then the AI in question is not a moral agent that can be held responsible for its actions, and that is essential when you’re dealing with human lives. In other words you’ll still need psychologists picking the output of said AI and making informed decisions on what the patient should [not] do.
Furthermore, I do not think that those “AI systems” will be remotely as proficient at human tasks in, say, a decade, as some people are claiming that they will be. AI is a misnomer, those systems are not intelligent. Model-based text generators are a great example of that (and relevant in your case): play a bit with ChatGPT or Bard, and look at their output in a somewhat consistent way (without cherry picking the hits and ignoring the misses). Then you’ll notice that they don’t really understand anything - they’re reproducing grammatical patterns regardless of their content. (Just like they were programmed to.)
I haven’t heard of Replication Crisis. Thanks for pointing that out.
It boils down to scientists not knowing if they’re actually reaching some conclusion or just making shit up. It’s actually a big concern across multiple sciences, it’s just that Psychology is being hit really hard, and for clinical psychologists this means that they simply can’t trust as much the theoretical frameworks guiding their decisions as they were supposed to.
I’m sure as fuck glad my therapist is a human and not a Chatbot.
Also, psychologists will be needed to design AI interfaces so humans have an easy time using them.
A friend of mine studied psychology and now works for a car company, designing their infotainment system UI so that people can instinctively use it without consulting a manual. Those kinds of jobs will become more, not less in the future.
