Honestly that’s totally fair and I can see how an AI therapist could help more than a human one. I personally have wanted to have a regular therapist for a number of years, and I had one that really helped me when I was first figuring out I’m trans, but then I moved and now whenever I try to look for therapists, it feels like I can’t find anyone that gives me those right mix of “LGBT literate”, “(Polish) immigrant literate”, “autism and ADHD literate” and on top of those, being able to figure out if I can vibe with them AND won’t “queer broken arm syndrome” me, and I’ve basically given up looking. A lot of my progress in mental health development lately have been just really reflecting about the ways of thinking I’m stuck in that maybe are hindering me, but that’s largely worked for me because (despite the state of the world) I’ve had a period of good stability and a wife to bounce thoughts off of.
Thank you for sharing your experience, I can definitely relate to those kinds of struggles and understand how having a tool that just gives you other perspectives generated from a composition of average people’s posts would be useful unto itself! I guess I get really knee jerk about AI because I’ve seen so many projects that do treat the AI tools we have now as “actual literal synthetic sentient intelligence or something damn close” when it’s nowhere near that. Your use of it is actually a perfect understanding of what it does now, what it can give you, and how to make use of it, and I should be more careful in how I talk about AI when there are people who do gain genuine use from it.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective!
We’re not talking about an AI running a nuclear reactor, this article is about AI assistants on a personal phone. 0.001% failure rates for apps on your phone isn’t that insane, and generally the only consequence of those failures would be you need to try a slightly different query. Tools like Alexa or Siri mishear user commands probably more than 0.001% of the time, and yet those tools have absolutely caught on for a significant amount of people.
The issue is that the failure rate of AI is high enough that you have to vet the outputs which typically requires about as much work as doing whatever you wanted the AI to do yourself, and using AI for creative things like art or videos is a fun novelty, but isn’t something that you’re doing regularly and so your phone trying to promote apps that you only want to use once in a blue moon is annoying. If AI were actually so useful you could query it with anything and 99.999% of the time get back exactly what you wanted, AI would absolutely become much more useful.