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.
Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.
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.
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.
amen. best thing i ever did for my mental, physical and financial health was to stop dating.
most women I ever dated were nothing but a total drain on my well-being, and did almost nothing to contribute to it positively. the only women who were ever really a net positive to me were female friends who encouraged me in my interests and passions and who shared those same ones with me.
Sadly I’ve never been able to date anyone who saw my passions as a positive… just a negative becuase often their soul interest in the world was getting money, attention, and generating drama out of our relationship so they could ‘feel feelings’. So many ladies see relationships as nothing more than drug dispensing feel good machines (the same women who think all men want is sex… ironically). People need to realize that relationships are way more than that.
I remember so many times trying to have serious talk with my girlfriends and they just… got uncomfortable or just tried to sex me up to shut me up. They dind’t want to deal with anything serious or adult. And these were adult women in their 30s. The only adult things they wanted to talk about was vacation plans or restaurants.
But it sucks, as happy as I am alone I want something more. I want a family and kids and to contribute to society in that way, but frankly, I don’t really meet any women who want that. They just seem to want to be consumers first and foremost and productive members of society who care about more than themsevles… is not really on their wishlist.
I have been volunteering a lot, but it’s really not the same. It’s nice, but like working out, it doesn’t feel like it’s really going anywhere other than just staving off the inevitable decline as best I can. All my volunteer work just is a tiny drop of givnig a shit in the massive bucket of neglect that is our society as we amuse ourselves to death via social media and consumer trends.
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.
Also you shouldn’t go with US Default mode on Lemmy since you guys are a minority here. Most of us are European.
Cool, I’m glad you’re so enlightened and open minded as to uh … not give a fuck about perspectives from places you aren’t from.
As for you telling me how to use an internet message board… what more do you want from me?
I told you where I am from and what I am talking about.
I’d love to be able to move to Europe and get away from this fucking imploding hell hole of morons.
But I am broke and physically disabled after being the victim of numerous physical assaults.
Are any of ya’ll accepting disabled American aslyum seekers, so we can easily enjoy your civilized world?
Didn’t think so.
Focus on fixing your country and making it a decent place to live. That way you don’t need to go anywhere. That’s what we’ve been doing for decades, and it works.
young people feeling depressed and isolated is the least of your problems.
Children are the future of EVERY country. The future is looking bleak for young people in the US. Where do you live? Are young people unaffected by social media or what?
Out here in actual civilization though, tik tok youth drama is not representative of reality whatsoever.
That’s the thing though. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes, but for lots of young people, social media IS their reality. This became even more true during the pandemic. We asked young people to go to school on a screen and pretend it was the same as doing it in person. Why wouldn’t they have the same mindset about chatting, hanging out, flirting, dating, etc.? They don’t see it as simulated socializing, it’s just how they socialize.
You can use rethoric and anecdotes all you want but at the end of the day (literally) all you need to do is look out the window and see how many people are out socializing and fucking each other like rabbits.
Those Tik Tok girls complaining about men do so because they are outliers who can’t get attention IRL. Simple as.
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’.
🤷♂️
I’m a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I’ve seen often:
- Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
- Man doesn’t share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
- Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
- Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
- Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
- Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place
It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It’s not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it’s precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don’t have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can’t afford therapy.
If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It’s a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who’s committed to listening, caring, and not judging.
man is conditioned from a young age not to show feelings
I feel like you skipped over this part way too quickly. Myself and other men have been hearing things like “it’s not manly to cry”, “whining isn’t going to do anything for you”, “being weak is girly”, and countless other things for my entire memorable life
And it’s not just men telling me this. It’s men, women, adults, my classmates, teachers and mentors.
It’s not a good thing. And it’s changing now, which is so good. But man hearing that from your earliest memories makes it really set in.
Thank you for expanding on that point. I meant it to be a “here’s how we got here” before the rest of my “this is where we are today.”
You’re totally right, and any conversation about men’s behavior at large should include the experiences you just described. Even though we didn’t get ourselves into this situation - in that we didn’t raise ourselves - we’re the ones who will get us out.
Because they want us to open up, just not to them. T
The irony is so many anti-patriachical feminists, still desire the patriachy. They still want dominant tall wealthy men to romance then, but at the same time they claim to wait to tear these men down into some genderless socialist utopia… where they’d never want to ahve sex with any of the ‘ideal’ men they believe woudl exist in this society.
You can’t have it both ways.
🤔
That’s interesting… had never seen it put that way before…
It’s almost like telling men that it’s okay to show your feelings is bullshit lol
Do you think this therapist is trying to market therapy and increase his business? I also think the same 🤨
/j
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.
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.)
won’t ruin your career
Granted, but it still will suck a fuck ton of coal produced electricity.
One chat request to an LLM produces about as much CO2 as burning one droplet of gasoline (if it was from coal fired power, less if it comes from cleaner sources). It makes far less CO2 to talk to a chatbot for hours upon hours than a ten minute drive to see a therapist once a week.
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.
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.
They can’t make it better… you can’t have a relationship with an autocorrect
ok.
but the problem is that real therapy is expensive, and unaccessible, while AI is freely accessible, even though it’s shit.
and open ai is profiting from that.
I’m just saying the blame should be aimed at the corporations and the healthcare system, rather than someone who is desperate for help
a terrible therapist can lock you in a room, some people don’t want that risk
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.
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.
I’m gonna need a source on that.
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”
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.
.
amen to all this. i really started removing ‘leftists’ people from my life and it was like… so much better because so much of their entity message is just this weird revenge/hate pron against straight white men, and men in general. when ironically, the people they should be angry at are the wealthy… but honestly most of these ‘leftists’ I’ve known were trust fund kids… so that tells you right there why they would never rag on the wealthy…
normal well adjusted people don’t hate anyone or blame anyone for their problems. but for some reason it’s become mainstream A-OK to say horrible awful shit about men that would you get you banned/shitcanned/ostracized if you said ti about anyone else. esp in liberal/left groupthink.
it’s entire the same discourse as neoNazis and all that too… just replace jew/black with white straight men.
this sort of stuff gets downvoted incessantly in leftist spaces which is a damn shame bc i feel like a lot of these places are my home to a certain degree. it makes me feel unwelcome. ik that’s like, the fucking point and why they do it but still.
these sorts of people are just on some weird, misguided, revanchist agenda that necessitates getting “revenge” on certain groups of people instead of sticking with the core principles of the ideology which clearly state that you should kindly refrain from being an asshole. there is nothing to be gained from exacting some revenge fantasy upon straight white men. you’re exactly right, the only people who deserve to have shit flung their way over who they are is the rich and powerful.
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
appreciate the offer king. i might check in and occasionally participate in the comm, i like the idea.
my main concern is ensuring there isn’t a weird invasion of the space by neofascists. that’s the main issue with men’s rights spaces currently. it doesn’t seem easy to prevent as every such space i come across has this problem. the exact thing we identify as hating here pervades spaces trying to tackle this problem… something of a catch 22.
i fucking adore the naming, tho. reprieve is exactly what we all need. i think you should really lean into the abandonment of identity and related identity politics for this community. it shouldn’t be about men in particular, it’s about a reprieve from this shitty contemporary world we have grown up into. after all, race or sex or whatever aren’t even real… they’re just arbitrary lines that cultures draw upon the world. important to individuals maybe, yes, but i’ve always felt it to be something of an albatross around the left’s neck. not all right-wing criticisms of “identity politics” are necessarily unwarranted… (😬 oopsie i broke the groupthink too hard that time guys o nooooos 🙈)
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
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?
I see a lot of people in this thread reacting with open hostility and derailment every time men’s issues are mentioned. Have you tried not being a part of the problem?
Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.
After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.
There are people like that for anything related to AI.
Combine that with men stuff and this going to be crack for all of those people
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.
Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it’s an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it’s in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they’re willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it’s awful that they have to do that, but this isn’t like sharing memes… in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There’s no reason the machine can’t do that, and while it’s not as good as a human, it’s a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.
therapy does not have to be expensive.
around 70% of my caseload is Medicaid and they don’t pay a dime. the remainder is mostly DOC (prison), they only pay if we charge No Show fee. so they pay to not go to therapy. There’s 1-2 people who are funded by the county. they pay a $7 copay per session
Therapy isn’t expensive, luigi is.
As far as efficacy, we don’t even have data suggesting AI therapy is effective. we have ample data, however, showing that the most important part of therapy is not what you do but the relationship itself. not individual efforts. so your theory about what therapy does for us is wrong. there’s no relationship with an LLM. we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.
therapy does not have to be expensive.
But it is though.
Your medicaid patients?
Poor. By definition.
Sure they might not pay a copay, but they pay for it in gas money to get to that visit, their barely running car now breaking down from visiting you, time off work they can’t really afford, time filling out reams and reams of fucking paperwork to be able to qualify for anything, likely when they’re already in a mentally comprimised condition to some extent… its all very stressful.
Which is very bad for mental health.
we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.
And the part you don’t want to admit (at least here) is that … that’s actually quite helpful in and of itself for a lot of people.
Have a few sessions with a live, in person therapist, to teach you CBT, give you the paperwork, walk you through it.
Not all, but many people can take it by themselves from there, and not need to keep wasting time and energy on continually requalifying for medicaid, getting to and from psych appointments, dealing with scheduling delays and unavailability, etc.
Yep, a lot of people are also helped by basically just having someone to be able to talk to and feel heard.
But… that’s often doable by just making either a friend or even casual acquaintance with someone who is capable of, and has the capacity for reflexive empathy.
Much less stress and paperwork involved there.
And also yes, some people with much more serious issues need much more serious help.
Unfortunately, the entire medical system in the US is utterly broken, and the only real solution to having a system that … isn’t broken, so that comprehensive screening and diagnosis is easily available without huge delays and costs… and more broadly, those people need to have the first two levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs taken care of.
But currently our society basically just takes those people and throws them into the streets, evicts them, forecloses on them, incarcerates them.
There simply is no systemic way to help those people without major systemic changes… and those ain’t happening, they’re moving in the opposite direction.
…
The problem with LLMs as therapy is that they are wildly overconfident, agreeable to the point of encouraging delusions and dangerous behavior, they hallucinate facts that aren’t real… and they are not actually capable of legitimate critical thinking or reasoning.
They also will not introduce you to concepts you have never heard of before which you do not know are or could be very useful, unless you directly ask them to do that, and even then… they obviously are not experts themselves and may suggest dubious ideas.
But also, at the same time… people often do form what they will describe as meaningful relationships with an LLM. So… its not that ‘it doesn’t happen’, its that its a psuedorelationship, a fascimile of a relationship, lacks in person interaction, a real human modulating their intonation, having micro expressions, body language, etc etc.
Like… yeah?
Tried to open to a girlfriend about a sensitive topic - she got the ick.
Tried to make an appointment with a psychiatrist - got a very hateful rejection because of my place of birth.
Damn, even when I try to uplift a friend, I use phrases like ‘you got this before, you’ll get it now’.
I don’t know how to be a man, mentally
Getting rejection because of place of birth is worth getting that doctors license revoked, find out which body governs doctors in your location and file a complaint
Haha, not every place is in the US. Hopefully, I won’t face this kind of treatment as I do not live in that shit hole of a country
I never said it was the US, do rules and regulations governing doctors behavior not exist in your country?
IDK, really. As I said, I left the country where this psychiatrist lives.
Become a rich jacked sociopath.
That’s most manly thing you can do apparently.
Sorry, I will pursue happiness instead
ChatCBT
If it had the memory for that, it might be useful. Plus another handful of caveats.
I think we may be (re)-discovering the appeal of monotheistic religions, and why they hew patriarchal.
On average, men desperately need more mental health resources. But, on average, they are not comfortable building that with other men, and it often isn’t appropriate or effective to lean on their female significant other (if a straight man).
So - enter the primary description of ‘God’. Can listen any time but will always forgive, is super masculine but won’t emasculate you, and has never told another soul what you are thinking.
AI is always available and is unlikely to emasculate anyone, but that third item… Well, we’ll see where this goes.
Omg self host it omg
You’ve basically just described “confession”. You go into a little box designed to make it as difficult as possible for the priest to identify you, you talk about all the ways you feel like you’re a bad person, and the priest talks to you for a while about it, then gives you some actionable items to make amends and once you’ve done them God officially forgives you. The whole concept of confession is designed to allow people to let go of their regrets and live in the now. It’s actually quite clever as a bit of societal design. If modern priests had psychotherapy degrees then everyone in the world would have access to free therapy - unfortunately they wouldn’t be very useful for LGBT+ people.
Lol see where it goes? If you think these AI companies, that are very publicly bleeding money, aren’t selling your data out for pennies on the dollar, you’re just keeping your head in the sand.
I’ve been asking Google Gemini weird and stupid trivia questions just to burn the world down faster.
I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.
AI might also be giving them better advice than anyone else in their life.
Growing up I certainly had no role models in my entire community. I never found anyone who was remotely helpful until I went to an expensive college that had lots of resources and they were freely accessible to me. Mental, physical, and academic.
A lot of people fail to realize these resources simple do not exist in large swaths of the country/economic bracket. They are mostly concentrated in wealthy and educated areas and given to wealth educated people who live there. If a farmer in Nebraska needs therapy, they will have to drive to multiple hours to Omaha or another urban area to have a decent shot at getting any assistance. Not everyone lives in a major coastal city that have the bulk of these resources.
I dunno about advice, but LLMs are very good at re-stating my meandering thoughts in a concise way that’s easy to communicate to others.
It might even, gasp, offer solutions.
I don’t think the open internet is a great place to open up about your mental health either. Trusted family, friends, and medical/mental health professionals are the best resources. Entrusting something as precious as your mental health to AI or the internet is a profoundly bad idea.
A local llm could (at least appear to) be the best option (on an individual scale) for people that would be reported by mandatory reporters (which mental health professionals are), such as suicidal people or murderers or pedophiles.
An AI isn’t gonna judge you,
Guess what is happening with that chat history.
Well those sound like people who aren’t good to open up to.
I do sympathize though, I pretended to be a guy for several decades, and my wife put exactly the same kind of duality on me that men put on women.
I was expected to be sympathetic and nurturing in some contexts and aggressive, jealous, and demanding in others, and I was just supposed to know when to switch.
And there was an amount of vulnerability I was able to display, but beyond that I’d get told to suck it up.
I think somebody needs to come up with an ad campaign that’s Therapy For Men. Big sweaty hairy guys with thick beards looking after each other’s mental health like BROs. It worked to get men to use soap.
(Seriously, I think counseling is too female-coded for a lot of men to be comfortable with it unless they’re fucking the person, or they start to want to fuck the person because they’re unused to talking about things).
I dealt with the same thing in all my relationships. Nothing got my gfs hotter than when I acted like a complete asshole towards other people. They got off the duality of me being shit to people and the being this ‘sweet man’ to them. And they’d get super jealous and bitter if I was kind towards anyone else other than them. It was Toxic AF. It made me hate myself and made me depressed. To know that i had to be a shithead to get my girlfriends to like me.
I’m so much happier single. I’d rather not get laid then have to be a POS asshole like they wanted me to be. Soooo many people get off on anti-social behaviors. I’m also so glad I never got married or had children with these ladies who have such a horrible Zero Sum way of thinking about the world.
They wanted me to be vulnerable, but only in the sense that I was some heroic figure overcoming the odds. If i said I was sad when my dog died or my dad died, then I was a giant pussy to them.
When shitty people only validate your shitty emotions… well that’s why so many women only date shitty men. Because they are turned off sexually by men who are more complex or behave outside of their per-determiend ‘what a man should be’ image. Especially when you reject them for sex… holy shit. Way to see what a lady really thinks of a men when a man turns her down for sex.
In my many years single now, I do a lot of volunteer work. Giving back here and there w/ kids and adults and community building. I’ve never met or a dated lady who thought it was cool. They all think it’s weird to be kind to strangers and/or I’m secretly homosexual if I do so. If it comes up they always get ‘suspicious’.
You’ve met some shitty women. There are some of us out there fighting against sexism in all ways. Not for females but for all people. Sexism hurts everyone :(
My mental image the solution of your last paragraph is a guy and their counsoler just chatting outside chopping firewood or other simple/quiet lawn work.
“I need a therapist, and a lumberjack”
Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.
I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.
AI will reinforce delusional thinking. This is definitely not good.
more delusional people means more people that can make good music
Honestly of they could program a halfway decent AI therapist then art least it could take some of the load off our already insufficient mental health professionals by dealing with the lighter-weight cases, leaving the psychotherapists free to deal with the especially sick people.
The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.
So… AI.
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?
Tbh, yeah. I’m a woman with an inoperable brain tumor, and I can completely understand why people would be reluctant to accept “nothing to be done” as a real answer.
If I thought I deserved to live, I’d probably talk to a LLM about it because this topic drags everybody down, and my therapist only sees me once a week. Though, I’ve heard its good for helping people not live, so maybe its worth a shot after all.
If I thought I deserved to live
But you do, everyone deserves to live.
Nobody deserves this kind of pain
So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don’t feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it’s not their own fault.
Just a note to say that the very first chat bot, Eliza, created in the 1960’s was a Rogerian therapist. I’m sure I remember a quote that the author was surprised that people opened up to it. I doubt anyone working in AI or chat technology would not know about Eliza so probably not a surprise to the industry… but maybe I am that old. [edits: facts/spelling etc]
Unironically the “Men will do X besides going to therapy” meme
Even therapists are suffering these days. It’s just more challenging than it’s ever been to gaslight clients into believing their concerns about the world aren’t objectively true and instead the symptom of an internal struggle.
