I started writing an answer. I realized that, while I’ve heard good things, and I know relatively a lot about therapy despite not being that type of psychologist, I’d need to do more research before I could offer an opinion. And I didn’t have time to do more research. And I realized that giving a recommendation would be sort of dumb-if you or anyone else used an LLM for therapy based on my advice, I’d be legally liable if something bad happened. So I tried something else: I had OpenAIs new Deep Research do the research. I got a subscription this month when it released to see how smart the o3 model that runs it is. And how good it is at research. It seems to be pretty good.
SO, this is a research report something like you might get if a smart and dedicated but not totally reliable friend spent a bunch of time on it. It’s not my advice. I hope this is helpful! Remember, this isn’t my advice—it’s nobody’s advice. It’s a synthesis of online material on this topic. It might save you many hours of research.
I don’t think hallucination is the biggest problem; I think sycophancy, the system believing what you tell it, would be the biggest risk. I personally suspect that frequently prompting the system to behave like a therapist would avoid that problem, since therapists are really careful not reinforce people’s weird beliefs.
Also, LLMs keep getting better in various ways. Problems with earlier systems might or might not apply to recent ones. In particular, hallucinations have been reduced but not eliminated.
Here it is. It’s a lot; I think it put the most important summaries at the top!
I started writing an answer. I realized that, while I’ve heard good things, and I know relatively a lot about therapy despite not being that type of psychologist, I’d need to do more research before I could offer an opinion. And I didn’t have time to do more research. And I realized that giving a recommendation would be sort of dumb-if you or anyone else used an LLM for therapy based on my advice, I’d be legally liable if something bad happened. So I tried something else: I had OpenAIs new Deep Research do the research. I got a subscription this month when it released to see how smart the o3 model that runs it is. And how good it is at research. It seems to be pretty good.
SO, this is a research report something like you might get if a smart and dedicated but not totally reliable friend spent a bunch of time on it. It’s not my advice. I hope this is helpful! Remember, this isn’t my advice—it’s nobody’s advice. It’s a synthesis of online material on this topic. It might save you many hours of research.
I don’t think hallucination is the biggest problem; I think sycophancy, the system believing what you tell it, would be the biggest risk. I personally suspect that frequently prompting the system to behave like a therapist would avoid that problem, since therapists are really careful not reinforce people’s weird beliefs.
Also, LLMs keep getting better in various ways. Problems with earlier systems might or might not apply to recent ones. In particular, hallucinations have been reduced but not eliminated.
Here it is. It’s a lot; I think it put the most important summaries at the top!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sEluk9wlrLQpLjWjnSduK-4lppM6yxjPiDXTO26te9I/edit?usp=sharing