I was in the doctor’s office today with a depressed guy going on and on about how his insurance had changed and was trying to kill him. I’m in the USA, so he is entirely correct.

I recognize AI’s value as an outlet for emotional connection. It is helpful to talk about things like disability and feelings of isolation etc., with someone that can be tolerant and understanding. Is there anything competent for AI character/friends online that is worth recommending to someone that is not technically capable and with no revenue or exploitation value to exploit? Just looking for a way to maybe save a guy from himself.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I’m not sure if I’d recommend doing self-therapy with AI. It is completely unsupervised and can go in all sorts of directions, including making it worse and reinforcing bad things.

    A better way would be finding a good book on the specific topic that maybe helps them understand the dynamics and offers some proven coping-strategies. And/Or talk to people in similar circumstances who can empathize. Maybe even something like a group, people who have been through that and now volunteer to offer their wisdom to other people. I’m not sure if such a thing exists. I only ever hear the advertising in podcasts for some company who offers online/phone therapy cheaper in the USA. If you’re lucky you have friends and family who listen to you.

    A LLM (AI) will tell you anything. Most likely something that sounds like a popular opinion on Reddit, because it was trained on data like that. And not a well reasoned answer that is factoring in the unique situation and the proper way to get out of it.

    However…

    That being said, I -personally- think a Chatbot can help combat lonelyness. And sometimes it comes up with solutions that I haven’t thought of, yet. And it will listen patiently. And sometimes just talking or writing down your struggles really helps.

    Precautions I’d take: Not take any advice it gives seriously. Always use your brain and think about it yourself. Don’t use AI if you’re not able to do this anymore. From time to time: take a step back and reevaluate your situation. Does it help? Are you in a downwards-spiral? Did it make it worse in other places or just replace your issues with other issues? Is this too addictive or do you rely on it too much and it takes away from you being self-sufficient?

    In the early days people used Replika AI for companionship. But they restricted that severely, it isn’t useful anymore. Nowadays there are “safe” AIs available (like ChatGPT) and “uncensored” ones. I’m not sure what to recommend to other people. The safe ones will refuse to talk about certain topics. Including this topic and they will instead lecture you a lot and tell you to go to the doctor. The “uncensored” (or less restricted ones) will happily engage. But the downside is, they aren’t safe. They are biased and will also give unsafe or even harmful advice.

    I’ve talked to people. And more than one person told me talking to Chatbots about personal struggles helps.

    Easy to use are the paid services. Big and well-known ones include character.ai and poe.com

    I think I’d go for some of the NSFW waifu services. There are a lot of them: lite.koboldai.net agnai.chat kajiwoto.ai venus.chub.ai chatfai.com crushon.ai janitorai.com charstar.ai candy.ai risuai.xyz …

    Some of them have a free tier or trial and some of them have therapist characters available. I myself use KoboldCpp and let the AI run on my own computer. There is also Oobabooga’s WebUI and a few others that are easy to install on a computer. And SillyTavern if you have some technical knowledge. But you need to choose a model and download a character description yourself, with these solutions.

    I don’t want to recommend a specific model. I’m not sure what level of unrestricted-ness or creativity will be beneficial here. There are lots of models available. From safe-for-work nice companions, to multi-purpose models that have been made by Meta or Mistral and probably have less bias than others, to completely unrestricted NSFW models that can also help you roleplay your fantasies. Maybe start slow and try the therapist characters from some of the services above before recommending something. If you need a model maybe start with something like Carl or Samantha, but I’m really unsure.