Aw, yeah it is easier to just look stuff up online and debate with LLMs, isn’t it?
I am not a therapist, but I have been to therapists in multiple countries (US, UK and India) for several years, and I can share my understanding based on that experience.
I think human therapist accountability has multiple layers. Firstly, you need a professional license for practice that involves years of training, supervision, revocable licenses, etc. Then you have legal obligations for ensuring complete documentation and following crisis protocols. If these fail (and they sometimes do), you also have malpractice liability, and free market feedback. Even if only 1 in 100 bad therapists faces consequences, it creates deterrent effects across the profession. The system is imperfect but exists.
For AI systems, training, certification, supervision, documentation and crisis protocols are all doable, and probably far easier to scale, but at the end of the day, who is accountable for poor therapeutic advice? the model? the company building it? With normal adults, it’s easy to ask for user discretion, but what do you do with vulnerable users? I am not sure how that would even work.
I found this post after publishing something of my own yesterday, and it’s wild how relevant this feels almost 2 decades later.
I’m not an expert on subjective probabilities, I come from analysing human behaviour and decision-making. What I find most fascinating is how you treat anticipation as a limited resource that has to be allocated among possible futures. In my world, people do something similar, but emotionally. We hoard permission the way the pundit hoards anticipation, waiting for perfect certainty before acting.
Recently, I watched someone spend months asking ChatGPT how to repair a friendship, crafting the perfect narrative, instead of just showing up. Therapists, astrologers and LLMs have all become proxies for “little numbers” that might make the risk of choosing feel safe. For so many of us.
I wonder if Bayesian reasoning is to belief what courage is to action? Because both are ways of updating before certainty arrives.
(If you’re curious, my essay exploring this from the emotional side is here: https://shapelygal.substack.com/p/youre-afraid-to-choose-now-arent)