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Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans

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  • It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.

    Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?

    Everything collects data. To extrapolate, it’s stupid to post on lemmy or shitter because the same will happen.

  • Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it's an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it's in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they're willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it's awful that they have to do that, but this isn't like sharing memes... in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There's no reason the machine can't do that, and while it's not as good as a human, it's a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.

    And you, coward? You can shove your downvote. You should feel ashamed of yourself for shaming people for seeking help because YOU don't approve of the way they go about it.

  • There are other causes here.

    They've been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

    It's a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they're withdrawing.

    I'm guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.

  • I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

    I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

    Then I do the excercises at home.

    CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

    There aren't any in the state anymore.

    ...

    I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

    CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Learning that as an acronym for cock and ball torture before the therapy version makes me laugh every time.

    My experience with women therapists was always about how I just wasn't paying enough attention to other people when I pointed out that the people around me weren't consistent enough to figure out their patterns. My one therapist who was a man explained that most people are just better at handling it when they were wrong and it is fine to be wrong, plus he helped me get diagnosed with ADHD instead of telling me to just try harder. I'll bet there are some therapists who are women who are just as good as he was, but it became pretty clear that social norms are just as hard for people who specialize in behaviors to overcome.

  • A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

    “Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

    Even in Canada, where mental health is still a value-add for most of us and not a right even under our current system, we are offered a fund with some jobs to use for either physiotherapy or mental health, and it's a limited fund.

    Give us a choice, and 10/10 times we will prioritize being able to walk and move and sleep effectively over feeling good about it.

  • I don't think people who are in a precarious financial situation spend their time talking to chatbots, they are probably too busy for that

    And you people complain about our ignorance...

  • CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Learning that as an acronym for cock and ball torture before the therapy version makes me laugh every time.

    My experience with women therapists was always about how I just wasn't paying enough attention to other people when I pointed out that the people around me weren't consistent enough to figure out their patterns. My one therapist who was a man explained that most people are just better at handling it when they were wrong and it is fine to be wrong, plus he helped me get diagnosed with ADHD instead of telling me to just try harder. I'll bet there are some therapists who are women who are just as good as he was, but it became pretty clear that social norms are just as hard for people who specialize in behaviors to overcome.

    This is a great example of the kinds of problems that can crop up.

    Fish doesn't realize its swimming in water, kind of thing.

    One approach is basically just gaslighting you:

    The things that bother you and cause you trouble... well they just shouldn't, and you should be fine with that.

    The other approach is.... you know, actually diagnostic, and can lead to... actually useful diagnosis, and thus more specified therapy and potentially other kinds of help.

    As an autist, I've gone through many similar situations.

    Sex/Gender independent... just 90% of therapists don't get it all. Always try to diagnose me with something else, and its different every time.

    Doesn't matter that I've done the full RAADS V test and I'm basically off thr charts autistic, rofl.

    Half of them have never even heard of it, don't know anything about how diagnosing or providing help to an autistic person works at all, tend to think all autists are low functioning with very severe, general social deficits.

    Then I get stuck on ... well they will rephrsse what I just said, and say/ask it back to me, and I'll say no, no I phrased what I said specifically, because I meant exactly that.

    Then I see in their notes later that I am 'arguementative' or 'agitated' or 'aggressive'... far, fsr more often if its a woman psych/soc worker/counselor who I am... not even 'correcting', just trying to not have them put words in my mouth.

    Men tend to be less intimidated and more open to my insistance that I meant exactly what I said... and I am talking in the same voice, same mannerisms, same everything, with everyone.

    Some women get it, most don't, some men get it, most don't.

    ... But the field is vastly disproportionately populated with women.

    So the end result for a lot of guys is... hey look, another woman that isn't really listening to me.

  • Well it was men's mental health month. Funny how I just found that out today. But please, let's talk about women's mental health issues.

    Wait, we have one of those?

    Genuienly had no idea.

  • A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

    “Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

    genAI chatbots are so predatory

  • It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.

    Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?

    Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.

  • And you, coward? You can shove your downvote. You should feel ashamed of yourself for shaming people for seeking help because YOU don't approve of the way they go about it.

    In my experience, it's likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive "AI bad! How dare you say AI good!" Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called "technology" there's a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

  • I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

    I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

    Then I do the excercises at home.

    CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

    There aren't any in the state anymore.

    ...

    I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

    There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

    If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

  • I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

    I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

    Then I do the excercises at home.

    CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

    There aren't any in the state anymore.

    ...

    I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

    There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

    If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

  • I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

    I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

    Then I do the excercises at home.

    CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

    Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

    There aren't any in the state anymore.

    ...

    I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

    There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

    If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

  • There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

    If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

    Oh I mean, I'm honestly fine.

    Had some real bad PTSD style flashback shit for a while, from being homeless for roughly 2 years, still jump at sudden noises and lights, but I've been that way forever, yay for abusive family growing up...

    But I only recently did a full check in with all kinds of medical specialists to reorient after I finally stopped being homeless, found a shithole that ain't too shitty, that I can afford to rent... literally, I just wanted a paper copy of the CBT procedures, because they've worked well, honestly very well for me in the past...

    And I now have numerous physical injuries from being homeless so long, getting the shit kicked out of me every other week, getting my shit stolen every other day, almost dying from now both a blizzard and a heat wave... SSDI needs you to actually have current medical contacts so they can pull records from them... and I had to get as much of my old MyChart files back together, I don't even remember how many phones I had that kept getting stolen, email accounts I lost access to.

    I appreciate the suggestion, but I seriously have never been as mentally free of stress as I am now:

    All I gotta do is focus on PT, then try to either get back to a job or start my own software freelancing gig... maybe make a video game... just gotta heal up my wrist and leg and back and ass a bit more, so I can actually sit and type at a 'puter for more than 15 minutes at a time w/o terrible pain.

    I honestly love being a hermit, away from my abusive family... I'm not lonely at all, I love the solitude, lemmy is really 95% of what I need for social interactions and excercising my own brain, and of course every once in a while, I hobble with my cane down and chit chat with a neighbor or two.

    Basically, nearly everyone in my life I've ever trusted or loved has abused or manipulated me in some way... not literally all, of course, but the vast, vast majority... so fuck em.

    Im happier off without em, and I now literally know that I can keep myself alive in the absolute worst possible situation... but, I'm still 95% immobile, don't have a car anymore, that got stolen, so its not like I could meet people and have a real social life anyway.

    Gotta heal the body first, literally get back on my feet. Been fixing up my financial situation best I can while I'm mostly bed ridden.

    PTSD attacks and night terrors ... and that instant jump to 'ready to defend myself with potentially lethal force'... yeah, that's dissapated significantly with the CBT excercises, and simply having my own, controlled environment, with relatively little external responsibilities... just took time.

  • Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.

    that's easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.

  • It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.

    Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?

    they need therapy, obviously they need help, and blaming them for not doing the most reasonable thing that might be unaffordable is even stupider.

    blame predatory AI, openai could in a single afternoon make it so Chatgpt recomends or even helps you find a local therapist, instead of enabling this for profit.

  • Oh I mean, I'm honestly fine.

    Had some real bad PTSD style flashback shit for a while, from being homeless for roughly 2 years, still jump at sudden noises and lights, but I've been that way forever, yay for abusive family growing up...

    But I only recently did a full check in with all kinds of medical specialists to reorient after I finally stopped being homeless, found a shithole that ain't too shitty, that I can afford to rent... literally, I just wanted a paper copy of the CBT procedures, because they've worked well, honestly very well for me in the past...

    And I now have numerous physical injuries from being homeless so long, getting the shit kicked out of me every other week, getting my shit stolen every other day, almost dying from now both a blizzard and a heat wave... SSDI needs you to actually have current medical contacts so they can pull records from them... and I had to get as much of my old MyChart files back together, I don't even remember how many phones I had that kept getting stolen, email accounts I lost access to.

    I appreciate the suggestion, but I seriously have never been as mentally free of stress as I am now:

    All I gotta do is focus on PT, then try to either get back to a job or start my own software freelancing gig... maybe make a video game... just gotta heal up my wrist and leg and back and ass a bit more, so I can actually sit and type at a 'puter for more than 15 minutes at a time w/o terrible pain.

    I honestly love being a hermit, away from my abusive family... I'm not lonely at all, I love the solitude, lemmy is really 95% of what I need for social interactions and excercising my own brain, and of course every once in a while, I hobble with my cane down and chit chat with a neighbor or two.

    Basically, nearly everyone in my life I've ever trusted or loved has abused or manipulated me in some way... not literally all, of course, but the vast, vast majority... so fuck em.

    Im happier off without em, and I now literally know that I can keep myself alive in the absolute worst possible situation... but, I'm still 95% immobile, don't have a car anymore, that got stolen, so its not like I could meet people and have a real social life anyway.

    Gotta heal the body first, literally get back on my feet. Been fixing up my financial situation best I can while I'm mostly bed ridden.

    PTSD attacks and night terrors ... and that instant jump to 'ready to defend myself with potentially lethal force'... yeah, that's dissapated significantly with the CBT excercises, and simply having my own, controlled environment, with relatively little external responsibilities... just took time.

    Yeah! Great to hear. Please continue to be a fixture in your neighborhood.

    As Fred Rogers told me once, in a conversation that was just between us, a friend is a person in your neighborhood.

  • In my experience, it's likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive "AI bad! How dare you say AI good!" Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called "technology" there's a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

    You know, I don't even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.

    It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    But no... I guess because the awful aspects of the technology as far as IP theft are - rightfully - the biggest focus, sorry, poor people, you just have to keep sucking it up and powering through! You want empathy, fork over the $100 an hour!

  • Yeah! Great to hear. Please continue to be a fixture in your neighborhood.

    As Fred Rogers told me once, in a conversation that was just between us, a friend is a person in your neighborhood.

    One thing that really lifts my mood is singing.

    I'm a reasonably decent natural baritone...

    For the longest while, I couldn't, due to fucked up abdomen... couldn't use my diaphragm right.

    But... thats getting better now, the PT is slow, arduous, and painful, but it is working.

    I was just in another thread posting Johnny Cash lyrics as a contrast to how shitty of a little turdboy Andrew Tate is.

    I fell in... to a burnin ring of fire... and so on, haha.

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    Just to add — this survey is for literally anyone who's been through the project phase in college. We’re trying to figure out: What stops students from building cool stuff? What actually helps students finish a project? How mentors/teachers can support better? And whether buying/selling projects is something people genuinely do — and why. Super grateful to anyone who fills it. And if you’ve had an experience (good or bad) with your project — feel free to share it here too
  • China is rushing to develop its AI-powered censorship system

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    why0y@lemmy.mlW
    This concept is the enemy of the a centuries old idealistic societal pillar of the West: Liberté, Libertas... this has blessed so many of us in the West, and I beg that it doesn't leave. Something beautiful and as sacred as the freedom from forced labor and the freedom to choose your trade, is the concept of the free and unbounded innocence of voices asking their leaders and each other these questions, to determine amongst ourselves what is fair and not, for our own betterment and the beauty of free enterprise. It's not so much that the Chinese state is an awful power to behold (it is and fuck Poohhead)... but this same politic is on the rise in the West and it leads to war. It always leads to war. And now the most automated form of state and corporate propaganda the world has ever seen is in the hands of a ruthless ruling class that can, has, and will steal bread from children's hands, and literally take the medicine from the sick to pad their pockets. Such is the twisted fate of society and likely always will be. We need to fight and not with prayers; this moment is God forsaking us to behold how the spirit breaks and what the people want to fight for as ruthlessly as the others do to steal our bread.
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    That is a drive unit. The robot is bending down next to it wearing a vest.
  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

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    dsilverz@friendica.worldD
    @technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.-----First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..." "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").
  • YouTube Will Add an AI Slop Button Thanks to Google’s Veo 3

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    anunusualrelic@lemmy.worldA
    "One slop please"
  • Why Silicon Valley Needs Immigration

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    "Because theyŕe greedy fucks". There, saved you a click.
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    It's a shame. AI has potential but most people just want to exploit its development for their own gain.