Cringing so hard at people making the argument that AI chatbots are good for therapy or friendship or emotional connection. You have completely misunderstood the purpose and value of that portion of your brain and the goal of that activity!!! That's not connection or friendship or therapy!!! You aren't improving your social skills, you are accustoming yourself to interacting with a subservient fantasy with no needs or inner life of their own
@vaurora They seem to be useful as tools for consequence-free social emulation to help people with too much anxiety to start with real-world interaction. They're also getting better at theory of mind, so coaching the socially inept is probably in the cards too.
@paul I hear you and I can see therapeutic games designed exactly for that, but you can't develop theory of mind using something that has no mind creating it. People can and may benefit from using AI chat, but only with the self discipline and knowledge of your average student therapist, or luck
@vaurora I don't personally use them for therapy, but I know some people that have benefited from treating a local LLM like a snapshot of language. It's a tool for quickly and privately approximating the text that would follow a given string. I just wish people knew that coherent llama3 quants can run locally on a Jetson Orin, or a GPU from 2018.
