Did they compete on providing actual therapy? No? Then this is meaningless.

I’ve used AI as a pseudo-therapist. It was kinda surreal. It had some helpful things to say, but there was a whole lot of cheerleading. Like, I appreciate the boost, and telling me how great I am. Then it kept trying to push me into an action plan like it’s selling a Tony Robbin’s book. And it never really challenged me on my representations or perspective except when I was done in myself.

I get it, when someone comes to you with troubles, try to make them feel better about themselves. But I really have to do a lot of searching to figure out what parts are worth paying attention to and what parts are just hyping me up.

I definitely would not trust it, but I think it says some useful stuff by accident now and again.

Maybe it would’ve done better if I’d given it really detailed instructions on how to be a therapist, but if I could do that I could probably give those same instructions to my wife or someone and be better off.

Imitating a therapist is not too hard, look up Eliza. Was it good as an actual therapist? Haha, no.

From the study

Using different measures, we then confirmed that responses written by ChatGPT were rated higher than the therapist’s responses suggesting these differences may be explained by part-of-speech and response sentiment. This may be an early indication that ChatGPT has the potential to improve psychotherapeutic processes. We anticipate that this work may lead to the development of different methods of testing and creating psychotherapeutic interventions. Further, we discuss limitations (including the lack of the therapeutic context), and how continued research in this area may lead to improved efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions allowing such interventions to be placed in the hands of individuals who need them the most.

I don’t trust therapists, but I trust OpenAI with my mental state about 100x less.

That is one bullshit headline. Forbes keeping the AI pump and dump scheme going.

TLDR: People correctly discerned that written responses were from an “AI” chatbot slightly less often than they correctly discerned that responses were from a psychotherapist.

“AI” cannot replace a therapist and hasn’t “won” squat.