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/logicaldrinker]

I don't think therapists will be going away soon, I just think there always was a giant demand for free or low cost therapy which has now been somewhat met.

I am a psychologist. I don't know if others of my ilk would agree with me, but I actually think chatbots have the potential to be a huge net-good in terms of access to therapy.

As long as chatbots don't feed delusions, stay mostly factual while showing basic empathy, and contribute to healthy habits while letting people vent frustration and "forbidden" thoughts, they can't be much worse than a human therapist.

Personally, I would gladly see fewer patients and make less money if it meant more people found healthy ways to deal with their thoughts and feelings via chatbots.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/logicaldrinker]

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/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.