A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.
“Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.
The amount of sexism in this comment section is…unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn’t I’ll make one.
What a clickbait. Of course people are picking feee resource with zero friction over 120$ an hour half a day event.
I think it’s probably more complex than just money.
TBH this is a huge factor.
I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I’m socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.
It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I’m talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.
It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment tied to someone toxic, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.
But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.
Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN’T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.
Alternate title “Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI”
Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”
yeah they are definitely making dumb choices. it’s probably not because they’re all just dumb though. they probably have a lot of external factors pushing them towards that decision.
for example, many discussions tend to find ways to blame and shame them instead of responding with empathy. sort of like this comment. what benefit do you think you get by reframing things to blame the men here?
This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members’ sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.
Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?
💯
Have you ever considered not being like this?
probably not but that’s because sexism against men is normalized and you’re not allowed to talk about it unless you’re a neonazi for some reason.
side note, this is exactly why the “young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt” pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them “life isn’t so bad, it’s okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it’ll all start to look up soon champ… and uh… also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they’re the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!” people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it’s obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.
the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the “right kinds” of people most won’t even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don’t like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they’re better people morally but we’re really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.
I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn’t degraded people’s capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.
I’m here to talk if you need an ear man, I understand you and it sounds like you’ve been through your own personal brand of shit
If you really honestly don’t understand why what you said was horrible I’m willing to have a conversation with you if you want to DM me to talk about it. For starters, men feel scared and uncomfortable because their serious problems will get made light of just like you did. Or told to “man up”. Which I imagine was on the tip of your tongue
Have we considered this may be the only time it’s actually justifiable to have real people controlling the “AI”. Like instead of an underpaid tech worker from the global south answering coding questions, we get therapists to pretend to be AI so men will actually talk to them.
they better fuckin bill me for it
And it’s awesome. Men aren’t allowed by others to show weakness. AI therapy genuinely helps a lot.
Or it gets them into a negative feedback loop since AI hardly ever tries to contradict you.
But yeah. At least they’re opening up to someone/something.
Better than nothing I guess. Obviously it’s a privacy nightmare. But therapy is hard to reach nowadays and I’ve noticed that many men are reluctant to make that step. It’d be preferable if they did, but if ChatGPT can at least give an outlet for the emotions then it might just save a few people. Seeing men demolish themselves because they’re too ashamed to seek help is something I’ve unfortunately seen quite often. Even though I’m aware of this I’ve still waited till it was way too late because I subconsciously didn’t want to give in to the “weakness”. I hate that men are conditioned this way, it costs lives.
many men are reluctant to make that step
Sometimes it’s not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood… I sought help… Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn’t work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got “nothing” (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second “struggled to find any complaints from me”. So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and “care” in general, human or whatnot). I don’t use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I’m deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn’t get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have “Geschwind Syndrome”, a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).
It’s possible to reduce the privacy issues by using APIs with a local frontend. Given that APIs usually cater to companies instead of end consumers they actually have simple opt-outs for information logging.
Requires a bit of know-how, and you’ll be paying for your llm per use (not that bad actually, I’ve personally averaged <10$/yr in api costs) but at least you get to have all your personal issues on your local device instead.
For a chatGPT-like experience you probably want the ooga booga web generation ui but there’s others too.
This thing has been trained on social media. Is that really wise?
I mean, I know they fixed it, but LLMs once suggested jumping off a bridge if you searched for help with suicidal ideation
“Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!”
I mean, that is basically what maintenance programs are :(
I thought that was methadone, or did Trainspotting lie to me?
I’d like to thank a childhood of having no friends to offer me any drugs for keeping me away from a lifetime of addiction.
It is methadone, but that is just a synthetic opioid. They say it is slower acting, and not as euphoric, but that all changes when you bang it. Some places will watch you take it though. However most don’t bother, they just want the money from the government and give you the pills.
Maybe because it’s cheaper, easier and you’re not judged by other person.
You get what you pay for. Would these same people take cancer treatments from the same LLM?
Sometimes I wonder if I am, in fact, a man, because every time an article like this rolls around I’m like the fuck I do.
Revolution my ass. LLM make for poor psychologists.
Well. Not very different from “opening up” to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.
And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.
For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?
You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.
And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn’t think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it’s our job to root out our time’s weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.
Which means that nice world doesn’t survive evolution.
Maybe short term and in a ultracapitalist society. But entrusting your most inner fears and hurtings to a company is not GDPR compliant, even less so with the more caring social economies.
Gee I wonder why ?
ChatCBT
If it had the memory for that, it might be useful. Plus another handful of caveats.
Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.
Also talking to ChatGPT, if done anonymously, won’t ruin your career.
(Thinking of AD military, where they tell you help is available but in reality it will and maybe should cost you your security clearance.)
I think there’s a lot more to it than cost. Men, even with considerable health care resources, are often very averse to mental health care.
Thinking of my father in law, for example, I don’t know how much you would have to pay him to get him into a therapist’s office, but I’m certain he wouldn’t go for free.
There are other causes here.
They’ve been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
It’s a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they’re withdrawing.
I’m guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.
because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
I’ve got no horse in this race but it appears that ‘men should not be afraid to open up’ articles and tweets were followed by ‘men, we are not your therapist’.
🤷♂️
The flip side of that is vast numbers of Gen Z Men saying many Gen Z women are basically misandrists, who asked them to stop interacting with them unprompted, no more unwanted attention… so they did that, they stopped… and now all they see is IG and TikToks of Gen Z Women complaining that no one asks them out on dates anymore, no one is 6’ tall with a 6 figure income becore the age of 30, and willing to worship them as a queen.
I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.
So, in that situation: Why bother?
Many men can actually be fulfilled just staying actually single, as in not even dating single, snd getting their own lives, finances, health, to a better place.
Yes this does though also mean that … because we’ve just got less general, face to face socialization going on that… basically a larger than otherwise number of them will basically develop harmful, reinforcing neuroses, in harmful echo chambers… but at the same time, that applies to women as well.
This is what happens when you jam a broad economic collapse up alongside a highly digital and publicized modern media landscape that is tweaked all to fuck to highlight and push the most extreme version of everything… along with extremely mixed messaging that an only digitally socialized person recieves, but all as a firehose, that is very hard to make true sense of.
So… fuck this shit I’m out… social withdrawal… basically becomes a reasonable mental health improving move, even if it does leave you kinda socially stunted as compared to pre-internet generations.
I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.
I’m glad you’re not because this is patently false. As soon as you get out of the internet you find young people dating is alive and well.
I mean, to a certain degree this is broadly true.
Like we have the numbers, younger generations are waaaay less likely to have had a relationship or sexual encounter by the same age/stage in their life as compared to previous generations, way more people just are relationship inexperienced.
This goes for both genders/sexes, though it is more prominent with younger men than women.
The overwhelming problem is that in the US, so much in person socialization is expensive, basically pay-gated, paywalled.
There are very few third places you can just hang out at for no cost. Public transit sucks or is non existant, cars are super unaffordable due to collapsing economy, and all our cities are designed for using cars to drive from place to place… so very few places are actually walk-navigable…
Everyone is increasingly overweight and overworked (or over homeworked, for students) and overstressed, so they can’t or don’t engage in group meet up hobbies or sports as much as they used to… and ironically even religiosity levels overall trending down means less people are going to church… all the traditional methods of getting socialization and expanding out a friend network in real life are withering.
So, the easier path is to get your socialization, of all kinds, primarily digitally.
But all those most common and popular ways of doing that are also massively manipulative with algos intentionally feeding you whatever ragebait slop appeals to you, personally.
It is very ironic that, as basically a 90s kid myself, very early tech adopter… my view of the vast majority of social media now is that it is basically a mentally harmful and addictive drug that people need to detox from… but when I tell younger people that, they say things like ‘its not that deep bro, everybody has a (whatever) profile’.
There are lots of studies that show that very common levels of social media app usage… do actually reduce attention spans, spread dangerous misinformation, lower academic performance, cause negative self esteem by way of unrealistic standards, of beauty, lifestyle, wealth… brainrot is real, basically.
Like, I am all for the TikTok ban for kids. But also ban all short form video content for kids. Instagram, Youtube shorts, whatever.
This shit is melting peoples brains, it needs to be treated the same way you’d treat a drug epidemic.
We are now at the point where kids give so little of a fuck, have such tiny attention spans and need for constant, rapid fire stimulation… that half of adult Americans read below a 6th grade level, 20-30% of them read below a 2nd grade level, making them functionally illiterate… and thats just with Gen Z now mostly being in those young adult numbers, its gonna be even worse when Gen Alpha graduates and starts trying to enter society/the workforce.
Well I don’t care about your anecdote about the US. That country is lost and young people feeling depressed and isolated is the least of your problems.
Out here in actual civilization though, Tik Tok youth drama is not representative of reality whatsoever.
Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.
I’d be interested on a study there.
I lot of therapy is taking emotions and verbalising them so that the rational part of the brain can help in dealing with things. Even a journal can help with that, so talking to an inanimate machine doesn’t seem stupid to me.
However therapists guide the conversation to challenge the patient, break reinforcing cycles, but in a way that doesn’t cause trauma. A chatbot isn’t going to be the same.
that’s easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.
a terrible therapist at least has an ethics board
a terrible therapist at least has evidence-based interventions on their side
a terrible therapist at lest has the fact that ~80% of positive outcomes have nothing to do with the interventions or anything the therapist does besides show up and be cool (a statistic I remember quite well from grad school)
AI has none of these things
therapy isn’t fucking magic. it’s a relationship. you can’t have a relationship with an LLM. there’s no such thing as AI therapy, you’re just training it to tell you about CBT worksheets while you bitch about your problems like you’re in a nail salon
The best therapist in the world can still end your career by causing your clearance to be revoked or rendering you unqualified for your unit’s mission.
(Suicide is a big problem in the military, I lost a buddy to it.)
The cheapest therapist in the world may still not be covered by your insurance. (And nothing you write in reply will alter that.)
They should work to make AI therapy better while keeping it totally anonymous. If it were really good it would be the number one use for running a local and disconnected and air gapped LLM: perfectly private therapy with no “we just use telemetry to improve our product” bullshit.
Then maybe a lot more men would seek help/talk about their thoughts and feelings.
Got it. No therapist it is.
That’s what I’m doing. That and screaming into a pillow most nights.
I don’t scream into a pillow. I just wake up at dawn and have a panic attack until I have to actually move.
It’s stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.
Like seriously – are people using their brains or what?
Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.
they need therapy, obviously they need help, and blaming them for not doing the most reasonable thing that might be unaffordable is even stupider.
blame predatory AI, openai could in a single afternoon make it so Chatgpt recomends or even helps you find a local therapist, instead of enabling this for profit.
Do they need therapy? Or do they need a world they can actually fucking live in?
It’s not like either one is available to them.
Neither is mutually exclusive, but most likely, both of those.
are people using their brains or what?
What? No. Seriously, are you new here? And by here I mean Earth.
I see idiots all around me. Everybody only interested in advancing themselves. But if we advanced the group, it would be better for EVERYBODY.
But we as a species are too stupid to build a society that benefits everybody.
So no. No brain use here.
I mean, the question war rhetorical. But I don’t disagree.
Everything collects data. To extrapolate, it’s stupid to post on lemmy or shitter because the same will happen.
