I'm not trying to convince you that it's, right now, a replacement for a human parent/therapist/caregiver. it's the "not anywhere close" part that I'm responding to. It's closer than talking with a speak and spell, or a See'n'say, for instance, but also ahead of static worksheets that you can't have a conversation with. I have no idea if this is good for society, and I have no idea where this technology will take us.
I want to know the limitations of this technology, and I'm willing to be convinced that, hey, maybe what some of it's saying isn't helpful as a therapist, because that's interesting. The number of R's in strawberry, for instance has a specific technical reason it's bad at, because of how tokenization works. If, after being fed every psychology textbook, the advice it gives would be egregiously or subtly bad/wrong/harmful, or biased towards, say, giving a Freudian analysis when the industry's moved way past that, I'd like to know and hear about it, so I better know when not to trust its advice and be able to warn others.
My instincts tell me that humans are shockingly good at detecting this difference. And when they aren't - they still won't like being lied to or tricked about it. You can see it already - generative art, or music for instance is (in some cases) objectively more impressive than art created by humans all else constant. You might trick a contest into giving you an award but the moment people find out it's generated, they almost immediately react cynically and no longer express interest in the result.
That's because they used to attribute the result to a person and now they know it's not a person. The psychology there probably isn't even fully fleshed out, but i feel it instinctively, as I said before. And I suspect others do as well based on the reactions here.
Sorry for assuming bad faith. i've met a lot of persons here who really do think LLM's in their current form are a kind of sentience. Blake Lemoigne (sp?) is a good example of that kind of naïveté.
I too have a human therapist, doctors, etc. And I too find myself chatting with ChatGPT, etc. about personal issues and in certain cases benefit tremendously from it. In particular, whenever it is something I would normally feel embarassed to say to another actual human. Since I am very confident ChatGPT doesn't have feelings or even an internal monologue with which it could "judge" me - I have no issue telling it such things.
But for precisely that same reason, it will never work (in its current form) as a _proper_ substitute for a human. Again, I'll just say that I don't think there's yet enough research on this but that "I know it when I see it". Any sufficiently serious topic I discuss with ChatGPT ultimately winds up with me drained because I feel as though I'm talking to a wall and not actually being acknowledged by anyone with agency who matters to me.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what your point actually is. Is ChatGPT in it's current form, a replacement for human contact? absolutely not. do people have strong emotions around something using a GPU and a bunch of math and was generated instead of being organically hand crafted by a human being, and having it fall into the uncanny valley? totally. is this box of matrices and dot products outputting something I personally find useful, despite shortcomings? yeah.
I agree that there's totally this brick wall feeling when ChatGPT spins itself in circles because it ran out the context window or whatever.
at the end of the day, I think the yacht rock cover of "closer" is fun, even though it's AI generated. however that makes you feel about my opinions.
It won't literally do that, the labs are all careful about the obvious stuff.
But consider that Google Gemini's bad instructions almost gave someone botulism*, there's a high chance of something like that in almost every field. I couldn't tell you what that would mean in therapy for the same reason I wouldn't have known Gemini's recipe would lead to culturing botulism.
These are certainly more capable than anything before them, but the Peter Principle still applies, we should treat them as no more than interns for now. That may be OK, may even be an improvement on not having them, but it's easy to misjudge them.
Why is that "not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver."?
Maybe I've had a bad parents/therapists/caregivers all my life, but it seems like an entirely reasonable response. If there's a more specific scenario you'd like me to pose and show me that it's advice is no good, I'm happy to ask it.