Comment on What one Finnish church learned from creating a service almost entirely with AI.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 1 month agoThis is actually false, which was surprising to me upon hearing this podcast episode: The TED AI Show: AI therapy is here. What does it mean for you?
Some people actually prefer AI counselors because they never judge, they’re infinitely patient, and they remember everything. There is a role for them. For me, while they’ve always messed up code, they’ve typically helped me figure out a different way to do something that I didn’t think of before, which eventually led me to newfound tinkering that got me to develop working code needed for my projects.
For this case, I think it’s the framework of AI being inserted into an existing institution that is causing this emotional stigma. If it was started separately as its own AI pep talk program or motivational system for social outreach and equality, then maybe it would thrive. So I think it can’t replace church activities simply because of their innate history.
PugEnjoyer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Honestly that’s totally fair and I can see how an AI therapist could help more than a human one. I personally have wanted to have a regular therapist for a number of years, and I had one that really helped me when I was first figuring out I’m trans, but then I moved and now whenever I try to look for therapists, it feels like I can’t find anyone that gives me those right mix of “LGBT literate”, “(Polish) immigrant literate”, “autism and ADHD literate” and on top of those, being able to figure out if I can vibe with them AND won’t “queer broken arm syndrome” me, and I’ve basically given up looking. A lot of my progress in mental health development lately have been just really reflecting about the ways of thinking I’m stuck in that maybe are hindering me, but that’s largely worked for me because (despite the state of the world) I’ve had a period of good stability and a wife to bounce thoughts off of.
Thank you for sharing your experience, I can definitely relate to those kinds of struggles and understand how having a tool that just gives you other perspectives generated from a composition of average people’s posts would be useful unto itself! I guess I get really knee jerk about AI because I’ve seen so many projects that do treat the AI tools we have now as “actual literal synthetic sentient intelligence or something damn close” when it’s nowhere near that. Your use of it is actually a perfect understanding of what it does now, what it can give you, and how to make use of it, and I should be more careful in how I talk about AI when there are people who do gain genuine use from it.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective!
Flagstaff@programming.dev 1 month ago
Yeah, TBH it’s still probably not actual “AI” and is really just complex, inaccurate autocomplete—proven by the fact that GPT 2.0 can be run entirely in Microsoft Excel lol (even though it’s certainly a massive table). So it’s just a buzzword…
Nevertheless, I think if it’s free and open-source, I can mildly get behind AI usage in certain situations. The profiteering models I have more of a problem with.