u/mayneedadrink

I'm currently working on a project that seems to assume everyone has access to Slack. I tried making a slack account and then clicking on their join link, but that did not work. From reading around, I get the impression I'm supposed to be part of a general Data Annotation slack page that then lets me get on to specific projects. I looked back in my e-mail and found an old invite that no longer works. Who do I contact about getting a new Slack invite so I can actually report errors for this new task? I'm super frustrated.

It seems like every couple of weeks, someone comes on here to tell us AI has too much sycophancy and therefore cannot do therapy. I had a friend say something similar recently. When I asked her to give me an example, she messaged chatGPT about having done something super unreasonable and then asked if she made the right decision. The AI moved to basically reassure and validate her that her action, while not perfect, was understandable.

To me, this doesn't seem like the best metric of whether AI can be useful for mental health. If your use case is, "Please validate the decisions I'm making in my interpersonal relationships," then at the very least, the prompt needs to be adjusted to something more like, "I'm going to tell you what I did. I'm going to tell you how the other person reacted. Please help me to understand both sides of this issue, what I may have done wrong, what the other person did wrong, and what blind spots I might be missing."

Will this get a perfect answer? Probably not. Still, it will probably do better than a simple, "Validate me," response.

All that aside, my typical use case for "therapy" is not actually, "Tell me if I'm the problem or someone else is." I mostly use it for behavioral activation to help me work on decluttering/cleaning (which is kind of a long-time process for me). I didn't really learn basic cleaning tasks as a child, and I have no routine about it, plus I tend to hold onto things. The worst-case scenario of sycophancy might look like AI telling me to keep something I ought to throw out or encouraging me to take a break when I should keep cleaning.

The thing about these types of issues is that if it tells me not to throw something out, I'll move on to the next thing and then keep working. Eventually, if I circle back to something AI validated me keeping and think, "Why the F did I keep this?" I can still make the free choice to throw it out myself. If AI keeps telling me to take breaks, and then nothing is done, I can stop and think maybe it might be good to clearly define how long I intend to work when talking to AI.

For me, being able to clean without anxiety/guilty/self-blame/shame is a MAJOR mental health need. I cannot afford a professional organizer. When I've gone to individual therapists about this, they've been able to talk to me about it in office, but they haven't been able to actually go through item by item and help me make decisions without guilt. They haven't been able to patiently explain to me how to scrub a stain out of my couch. They aren't able to make up for this gap in parenting that I reached adulthood with.

I feel like another use case that's common for me is something like, "I'm having a bad chronic pain/depression day. What should I do to keep momentum going so I at least have clean clothes and lunch to pack for tomorrow?" Having that real-time support with keeping my chronic pain and mental health stuff from ruining my day has actually been more helpful than traditional in-office therapy.

My specific needs that I go to AI "therapy" for are more mastery-based/needing to feel like I can accomplish things and take care of myself. I've found that the work I'm able to do with an AI is not work I could do better with a human. Even a human coach who helps with cleaning/organization would not be available on the spot whenever I'm ready to work.

Whenever people say that I'm just lazily using AI because I want to be validated and not "challenged," I feel like it misses the fact that not every mental health need involves needing to be challenged or corrected on your beliefs/thought process. People whose mental health needs do require that tend to come up with pretty sophisticated prompts to ask those types of questions, so I think the idea that we're all just asking AI to validate that we're right and everyone else is wrong is just based on assumption rather than actually talking to us and learning about what we do.