So I was talking to my mother today and she started talking about my brother, who is neurodiverse (we all are to some degree lol) and has always had trouble learning in school.
But over the past few years he managed to go from what is basically the ‘lowest’ possible degree to nearly a college degree. She said that he went to ChatGPT a lot for help fir writing essays and stuff and that he managed to go from struggling to write a one page report to getting straight A’s and B’s, which really surprised me.
What also surprised me is that he suffers from anxiety like me but that he talks to ChatGPT like it is a friend and that it really manages to comfort him when he is having anxiety attacks, going against the anxious thoughts he has at these moments. It never occurred to me that it could be used as a low entry level therapy form.
For example, asbestos was found in his house and he became really anxious about it to the point he could not function properly anymore. And he went to chat with ChatGPT about it and it gave him information on asbestos, on how high the chance was of something happening, of the building materials in the houses build in the decade in my specific hometown, etc. And it helped him get through his anxiety attack.
ChatGPT gets a lot of shit and rightfully so I guess but this specific use really surprised me and made me wonder if it could greatly benefit stuff like mental healthcare or learning problems.
I have talked to deepseek a couple of times when I was having a bad time and it didn’t help much because I can’t say for sure whether whatever it is saying as true or correct. This problem doesn’t exist to such a large extent in domains like coding because you can compile and run the program and test it against reality. LLMs being weird yes men is something I find deeply unsettling. On the other hand, what is someone gonna do? Talk to friends, family, therapist etc.? Some people can and should do this while others don’t have this privilege. So I can’t condemn people turning to chatbots for mental health support but I wish they didn’t have to do that. We will find out about the long term efficacy of therapist LLMs later but my prediction is that it won’t be considered useful for that.
For learning and stuff I find it a bit suspect because if you are using LLMs to learn something, you won’t be able to tell when it is making shit up. You might get decent results if you use it at a level up to high school and maybe early undergrad but aa things get more esoteric LLMs start becoming less reliable.