LLMs cannot be therapists, it will be obvious if you try to use one for therapy. In general, do not trust anything trained and gatekept so heavily by corporations with your personal data. That being said there is one small area I’ve found pretty legit help from them in the past.

In my opinion acute anxiety is one of the few use cases I’ve found where LLMs have been absolutely superior to other things for me. I am autistic and I can at times get pretty significant health anxiety, like I’m convinced I’m dying. In the past I would google it and really freak out. Sometimes (more than once) I’ve ended up in the ER from it.

I’ve found it helpful to describe my symptoms and mention that I have severe health anxiety and I’m able to get information from it without worsening my existing anxiety. It doesn’t replace a doctor, and if I’m worried about my health it means I need to see one. But in that exact moment what I need is to calm down and realize that my symptoms are probably not dangerous.

On the other hand I cannot talk to an LLM about personal things, or like it’s a friend. I have tried, I’m not saying it for moral reasons or anything. But I just get mad with how steerable the conversation is, how formulaic the responses sometimes seem, and how full of platitudes a lot of the messages are. And if at some point it misinterprets something I’m asking and decides to refuse it can really irritate me.

Although layoffs have jumped, the nation’s unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.2% and hiring has remained steady. The Department of Labor is set to release its June employment report on Thursday, with economists forecasting payroll gains of roughly 115,000 in May, according to financial data provider FactSet.

I literally don’t even know how to interpret things like this at this point. I hear that everything is falling apart and it’s extremely difficult to find a job (which matches my experience) and that jobs I general are getting worse (also matches my experience), and then I read that unemployment is “historically low” and companies are hiring. Maybe it’s true by the numbers as we measure them, but then we need a new way to measure these things because the numbers are not matching the reality.

Same here. Growing up autistic definitely primed me to be able to accept alternative ideas. When I was younger and my mom made me go to church I remember realizing that none of it made any sense and I didn’t believe it. I think my thoughts about Capitalism were pretty similar but just took longer.