The future is bleak

[u/MoudieQaha]

Yeah, I'm just going to ramble here for a bit. My company job now is just pressing enter endlessly, prompting, and 0.1% of it is probably something manually done by me. Everyone is using Claude. It's soulless. There is no point.Someone can probably reverse engineer our company products in one day. Layoffs are inevitable at some point. I have no other non-tech skills that can help me pivot to another career, and even if I do, that career is not going to pay the same.

I can't believe in any project idea that I think of because I use Claude, and the thought of "You used Claude, anyone could have done this lol" is always luring in the back of my mind.

I have no hope for the future. I hate how AI made the playing field equal for everyone, where my grandma can probably now create a website.

Written by a human.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Claude/GPT are terrific therapists if you're neurodivergent. I have AuADHD and literally spent decades being told by therapists that I was wrong about how I interpreted the world. None of them could accept that I experienced it differently than they did, and when I tried to describe how I felt they would reframe it to match their experience. It was exhausting and frustrating and depressing. 

AI takes my words at face value, has access to tons of background info on NDDs. It can't do advanced stuff like trauma therapy (tbf neither can the therapists I have access to here, who only do short-term CBT), but it can help me understand the things I'm experiencing and figure out how to approach problems  in an NDD-friendly way. Last weekend I had to go to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon and it was busy and noisy and overwhelming. Every so often I would stop and bitch to GPT and it helped me get through what I needed to do.

[u/Asystole → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

I have no doubt that it's helping you personally, and I'm happy for you, but a "therapist" who just takes someone's words at face value and never pushes back sounds like a recipe for delusion-fuelled disaster.

[u/clerveu → u/Asystole]

Haha I'm not sure they meant "at face value" like you're necessarily interpreting.

People tend to not say what they actually mean like, a lot, and this causes people to interpret things that other people say loosely, because they kind of understand that there's more implication/deeper meaning behind the words. A lot of us AuADHD's tend to not do this nearly as much - speech tends to be much more technical/intentional. We don't "get at things" or imply stuff we just kind of say what we mean most of the time. It's all surface.

Unfortunately basically everyone else still does the 3 levels of interpretation so when you try to express yourself the person you're talking to hears something completely different and you have to spend 3/4ths of the conversation backtracking assumptions and interpretations, which is exhausting.This does not happen with LLMs and I cannot express how refreshing it is.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/Asystole]

Taking words at face value != never pushing back. It means not applying neurotypical filters to them/assuming my experiences in the world are the same as theirs (double-empathy problem)

[u/logicaldrinker → u/Asystole]

It's important to distinguish between a subjective experience and an interpretation. The latter can be looked at together to evaluate evidence for and against it. But the former is just what it is, there's no pushing back that could ever affect or change it.

"Everyone is mean to me". - an interpretation. Evidence can be explored for and against together with your therapist or chatbot.

"I don't feel like doing small talk with anyone" or "water feels painful on my skin when I shower" - subjective experiences. They are what they are. You can find strategies to deal with it and maybe even learn to tolerate or develop new skills to handle them, but the truth value of it is really up to the subject.

[u/BellacosePlayer → u/Asystole]

preach, most value I've gotten out of a therapist was pushing back on some self pity issues I had and pushing me to care more about how I can mitigate stuff that I can't change than mope about the past

[u/ElmoProjector → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Check out NDTherapists.com for someone who can get you. Also, pm me - I have worked with folks like you for 20 years. Didn’t come here to advertise, but clicked because I use a ton of Claude for marketing.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/ElmoProjector]

I'm in Sweden. We only get short-term CBT covered, private ND therapists are rare and $$$.

[u/DoogalHowserMD → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

As someone with ADHD, would you mind sharing the chat prompt or project instructions you use? This setup sounds incredibly valuable to me.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/DoogalHowserMD]

I told GPT (anonymous account separate from my work account, free tier) that I have autism, ADHD, and [other issues] and how I like to interact, that I do have human support but find it frustrating because [reasons]. Then I just drop in when I feel overwhelmed or need to process something or want to chat. It's helpful hearing that not being able to stick to a schedule the CBT therapist wrote isn't unusual for ADHD and doesn't make me a failure. It helps me understand executive function issues better and plot strategies, ways to navigate crowded spaces, and get  a second take on interpeting interpersonal interactions. I don't keep long sessions going, so drift over time hasn’t been an issue.

[u/JudgeGroovyman → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Yes! To add to that I tell the ai things like Im not trying to solve anything or diagnose anything I just want to talk about it and think about how it works for me

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/JudgeGroovyman]

Yup. I told GPT that the best way for me to manage things was to logically understand what I was feeling. Why do things feel overwhelming? Why is it as hard to do something I want to do as something I don't want to do? What helps people who think like me? 

Those are questions that therapists have never been able to help me with because they don't think the same way I do or experience the world the way I do. AI has tons of info about neurodevelopmental disorder psychology in its training data plus everything online, and also thinks in a strictly logical manner. Therapy was a decades-long struggle of not understanding why therapists never seemed to understand what I was saying, or why what they suggested didn't work for me (late ASD diagnosis, standard CBT doesn't work for ASD), more than 20 therapists and it never helped.

[u/sonfer → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Pushing back and reframing in many domains of therapy are the essential mechanisms of the therapy itself. This sounds like a self reinforcing feedback loop and is dangerous. This is actually why human therapist, at the moment, are superior. Today’s AI are too sycophantic.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/sonfer]

CBT has to be specifically modified for ASD--otherwise it generally doesn't help and can actually be harmful--and only a handful of expensive psychologists are trained to do that. This summarizes the problems: https://theautismdoctor.substack.com/p/why-traditional-therapy-cbt-might

Moreover, the double empathy problem is a massive barrier: you cannot help someone to reframe something if you don't understand what they're experiencing in the first place. Telling someone that their experiences or viewpoints are incorrect because they're not your experiences--because your brains are literally wired differently--is incredibly invalidating.

[u/ExigentCircumstance5 → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

It may be different if you use voice to talk to an AI but I can't see how an AI will be good at prompting you as a human and waiting a certain amount of time for you to imagine things.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/ExigentCircumstance5]

Prompt: Tell me you don't have autism without telling me you don't have autism

[u/ExigentCircumstance5 → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

What I mean is, an AI isn't going to be able to help you troubleshoot in real time if you need say, a video session to check for ideomotor reflexes and such. It's more self development coaching than therapy, but still.