A lot of the r/socialskills subreddit is people complaining they don’t know how to make small talk or connect with strangers. I could easily see chatbots helping people get tons of practice with this skill in a nonthreatening environment.
I fired up ChatGPT to see if it could be a good aid for learning how to socialize, both in terms of providing a practice opportunity and in terms of offering coaching. I think it did a really exceptionally good job. Here is the complete log of our conversation, unedited except to insert two section headers and a table of contents.
It takes some skill to force ChatGPT to actually dialog with you instead of just simulating both sides of the dialog. You’d also have to have a certain level of insight into your own hangups. But that is probably an issue with any therapeutic context. I honestly felt like I’d had a brief but high-value therapeutic conversation when I was doing this, even though I don’t actually experience the level of anxiety around social conversation that I was pretending to deal with for the purpose of generating this conversation.
A lot of the r/socialskills subreddit is people complaining they don’t know how to make small talk or connect with strangers. I could easily see chatbots helping people get tons of practice with this skill in a nonthreatening environment.
I fired up ChatGPT to see if it could be a good aid for learning how to socialize, both in terms of providing a practice opportunity and in terms of offering coaching. I think it did a really exceptionally good job. Here is the complete log of our conversation, unedited except to insert two section headers and a table of contents.
It takes some skill to force ChatGPT to actually dialog with you instead of just simulating both sides of the dialog. You’d also have to have a certain level of insight into your own hangups. But that is probably an issue with any therapeutic context. I honestly felt like I’d had a brief but high-value therapeutic conversation when I was doing this, even though I don’t actually experience the level of anxiety around social conversation that I was pretending to deal with for the purpose of generating this conversation.
This seems like it might be useful to post to that subreddit.