Yes but still, talking to someone helps. No matter what they say back. If an LLM is the only thing around at the moment (e.g. in the middle of the night) this can be useful for therapeutic purposes.
Therapy isn't only about what the therapist says to you. There is a lot about you talking to them and the process that creates in the mind. By sharing your thoughts with someone else you view them from a different perspective already.
Then it’s actually better to talk to yourself. Not an LLM that’s trained on all of the internet’s combo of valuable and unhinged takes on all matter of trauma.
It's not the same. An internalised conversation doesn't have the same effect.
And I have good experiences with the LLM for this purpose. It's probably my prompt and RAG that I provided with a lot of my personal stuff but even the uncensored model I use is always supportive and often comes up with interesting takes / practical suggestions.
I don't rely on it for advice but for talking to when real friends aren't around and there's something urgent I'm worried about it's really good.
Would you be willing to email me at me@xeiaso.net? I have some questions I'd like to ask you as part of research for a followup piece. No judgement, I just want to know how it's affected your life.
I honestly would recommend against that but we’re all free to do with our brains as we please. I just hope it’s not as destructive as I intuit it to be…
