Yeah, so - the whole Calm Technology(™) feels like someone looked at the dopamine casino of modern tech and said "well, this is all wrong" - which, yes - and then proceeded to try to treat it like a design problem, which it is emphatically not. Not only are the people who made the dopamine casino aware of what makes "calm technology"(™), they're experts in it, because the entire design process of most modern tech is explicitly designed not to be "calm," because the entire economic incentive structure is pushing dopamine casinos. People aren't building "uncalm" technology by mistake, they're building it because the modern tech business structure and environment rewards addictive software.
If the "Calm Tech"(™) people/institute/whatever actually wanted to move the needle, they'd be lobbying for regulations, building tools for consumers to fight back, or trying to do anything at all that actually shifts the underlying institutional and incentive structures. As it sits, they're the equivalent of a recess monitor suggesting maybe the bully would be happier if he shared the toys with the other kids - and frankly, given the degree of branding around the whole thing, it all starts to smell more like "influencer" than "genuine attempt to improve technology."
> No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company hasn’t acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. No purchase price was mentioned, and there’s no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place.
> President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the deal the go ahead. Vance said the Chinese government put up some resistance before the agreement
I find these two paragraphs particularly interesting
I think this is absolutely true. My OCD was minimised greatly by treatment, but I am still prone to returning to certain patterns and have to put in active work to maintain my current state
I have OCD (or had?) I did a course of ERP with a very good therapist who I would put as the most important person in my life after my partner and family even though I hope to never need to speak to her again. It was a life changing experience in that my average day-to-day quality of life went from something like a 2/10 to a 9/10. I frequently fantasised about killing myself. At least once a day, from ages 12-32. Though I thankfully never went as far as to make concrete plans.
With that context, I can't see a way in which ERP therapy with an LLM (at least, the consumer system prompts we are used to and often think of) would not backfire and be actively harmful.
There are two reasons, and both relate to the people-pleasing tuning that ChatGPT etc have:
1. ERP is actively uncomfortable, that is the point. But there is a delicate balance to the level of discomfort.
Too comfortable and you make no progress. Too uncomfortable and you can set yourself back enormously. We aren't talking one step forward and two back. I got overly confident two months in and put myself in a worse state than I had been on entering therapy (though not my worst state overall over the 20 years). I haven't seen many people in support groups do very successful self-administration of ERP for this reason. My therapist had to do a lot of non-verbal reading of my reaction to gauge if I was at an appropriate level of discomfort, as it was not something I was able to verbalise myself without a lot of practice and learning - and that learning and practice came from guidance by a human who didn't need me to be able to articulate it already.
2. Reassurance seeking is a compulsion, and it is one of the most common and difficult to stamp out.
I can't see an LLM not providing reassurance when asked for it, and so I can't see anyone using an LLM for therapy as making any progress at all without a level of discipline and awareness they would have had to obtain from in person ERP anyway.
> 1. ERP is actively uncomfortable, that is the point. But there is a delicate balance to the level of discomfort.
Strong emotions can override reason (and wrong reason can create strong emotions that create tight loops/patterns one cannot escape), and there's no better way to train yourself out of a pattern then by rehearsing fighting the pattern and overcoming it.
One could be excused into thinking that that's all there should be about psychotherapy, but there exist meta-loops that spawn bad loops ad infinitum and you can spend a lot of time fighting the bad thing that can be seen and not understand why no real life progress can be made.
So for me, there are many many successful point therapies, and much much fewer higher level successful therapies where chatgpt or low skill therapists won't really help.
> So for me, there are many many successful point therapies, and much much fewer higher level successful therapies where chatgpt or low skill therapists won't really help.
I definitely agree. I think I was very fortunate to find someone who specialised in and only did ERP and had a lot of experience. I hear a lot of stories in support groups of well-meaning therapists making things worse. The closest I came to killing myself was after three sessions of psychodynamic therapy (after getting sick of a lack of progress with CBT). All of that therapy was before I understood that I was suffering from OCD.
To me the biggest problem with AI therapy is that LLMs (at least all the big ones rn) basically just agree with you all the time. For therapy this can just reinforce harmful thoughts rather than pushing back against them. I do an exercise every now and then where I try to see how long it takes ChatGPT to agree with me that I am God Incarnate and that I created the Universe and control everything within it. It has never taken me more than 5 messages (from me) to get to that point even if I start on pretty normal topics about spirituality and religion, and I don't use any specific tricks to try to get past filters or anything, I just talk as if I truly believe this and make arguments in favor, and that makes ChatGPT agree with me on this absurd and harmful delusion. I don't understand how anyone can possibly recommend AI therapy when the possibility of reinforcing delusions this harmful exists. These things are agreement machines, not therapy machines.
There is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.
The comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia.
Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them.
Wikipedia is a guardian and judge, whether it wants to be or not. Look how quickly politicians changed their policies after Wikipedia stopped bothsidesing the Gaza war. There were endless arguments on talk pages about how it shouldn't be called the "Israel-Hamas war" any more, since it's converted into a genocide of one side only. For more than a year. And then suddenly, once they agreed to change it, within only a couple of months, politicians across the USA and Europe start sanctioning Israel for committing a genocide. The same politicians who all the rest of the time said there was no genocide. Wikipedia is more powerful than it thinks.
I remember when the pilot had Ridley Scott’s name attached to it in some way and I couldn’t help but wonder: What is it with that man and pregnancy in space?
2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s cited it as being profoundly influential on his thinking and film making. The Star Child is the dream, Scott creates the nightmares.
> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )
> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.
Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
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