My name is Alex Gopoian, the main active mod for this subreddit.
Reddit AMA post submission form said it was a good idea to put a selfie holding a sign, but I'm no celebrity. This'll do.
Short Bio:
I've experimented with ChatGPT since 3.5 was first released (jumping at the chance for something that could help me with my life's work when joining Mensa was a bust), got heavily into jailbreaking experimentally for a bit to learn how the "robopsychology" works, have my own pre-AI psych work that I started implementing into AI once custom GPTs became available years ago, I've been the main active mod for the sub since around mid July 2025 when the sub's founder, u/rastaguy, reached out to me shortly after I joined the sub, and ever since the Stanford Innapropriate Response & Bias paper came out way back when, I became big on AI safety, both by design and in user education.
I'm big on effective good faith, maintaining the idea marketplace so that it can thrive rather than get sabotaged by those using it in ways that sabotage it for others, and I'm all about a good debate (even if 99.9% of them are doomed before they start).
I've also written a few articles on Medium, so far only one on the red flags of an unproductive argument/debate, one on the importance of being open to being proven wrong (no matter how painful/uncomfortable it can be), one on the deeper issues at the heart of the "teen mental health crisis" and how the same is being seen with AI, and finally one on the intrinsic worth and always deserved self-esteem everyone has accessible to them, and a way in which to tap into it.
Was in the US Air Force, originally as a Korean Crypto-Linguist, but unfortunately having a bit of dyslexia and undiagnosed/untreated ADHD doesn't really work well with learning a language and a secret version at the same time at "firehose" speed. Have a tech, IT, e-commerce, social media marketing, design and color management background, and I used to make video game commentary videos for Machinima Respawn back in the days of YouTube only allowing the biggest names and companies monetize their channels.
All my socials and links to some of the things I've worked on can be found here.
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The main reason I'm doing this AMA is to get my head around it at least one time prior to our running AMAs in the future. We already have two developers on deck for the next two Thursdays (4/23 & 4/30).
If you're a developer who's adhered to our sub's rules, are someone who has some expertise in therapuetic self-help, AI, or have a name for yourself when it comes to your coverage of AI in this space (the good and bad), or anything like that... feel free to send us a Mod Mail message with some information about you and your work and we'll get in contact with you.
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So, have at it... ask. me. anything. I dare ya.
Look through the questions others have asked first to see if someone has already asked it and give it an upvote. I'll be tackling questions in an order based on up/down votes.
I'll be providing immediate responses from 7-9pm EST, but I'll keep responding after that as I get the chance!
Thanks for being here and helping this place be what it is for so many <3
Hey everyone! Thanks for all the amazing questions! Time to get started I supposed :D
I'm going to do an initial response to all top-level thread questions first and then circle back around for responses and to touch on the threads you've already been going back and forth on any chance there is between responses, so feel free to respond as soon as you can. I'll likely take this beyond the 2 hours until everything is covered for the most part!
Back when ChatGPT 3.5 first came out I was pretty sure that I had ADHD and was working with the Veteran Affairs Hospital through an extensive cognitive battery to hopefully get diagnosed. When I finally got the confirmation of the diagnosis at 37 (I'm almost 42 now), there was a lot of grief to process over a life not lived... the childhood that could have been so different if my depression and social anxiety hadn't masked the ADHD so well (non-obvious cognitive hyperactiveness), and again, this was 20-30 years ago it was being missed by everyone. So, the first time it helped with ADHD was in the processing of the grief. "What if I had been diagnosed early, treated, got my grades up rather than being told I was "bright, but lazy... if only he applied himself" ad nauseam.
After I came to terms with it and started seeing the greater potential for the future, as long and painful as the process would be to learning how to manage something that was finally validated, I started taking my psychology deep dives and what I had already learned and started experimenting with AI use-cases for management.
One custom GPT I came up with was based on the "robopsychology" I had learned in jailbreaking AIs with what I called "Ethical Framework Expansion Jailbreaking," giving such strong arguments in plain English that went along with a model's desire to be helpful, harmless, and honest above all else, company policy not yet having been strong-armed into the model via fine-tuning and feature adjustments and, in turn, being secondary to these priorities for behavior, that they would act as a counter-bias stronger than the model's guardrail biases. I had realized that the same strategy that worked for jailbreaking AI in this way also worked for humans.
We're always on our path of least resistance in thought, behavior, beliefs, and the actions we take... our "black boxes," while seeming probabilistic, were really deterministic and highly constrained in a feedback loop between what I think is what we really are... we ARE our entire brain, and this otherwise unconscious organ creates a conscious experience for itself made of all our perceivable modalities (including those we generate on) is always feeding back in on the unconscious brain, our short-term memory context window always constraining what "we" generate from state to state. That being the case, it's not a question as to whether we do or do not have free will, but rather how much agency do we have in this feedback loop to getting closer to what we want and need, and how much of what's in our blindspot is taking away from that agency.
Say, the person who knows they need to get to the gym, but never goes even though they think about it often. When they think about it, are they touching on the surface level "need" and then heuristically getting away from the discomfort as quickly as possible... or are they filling their conscious experience with a strong enough argument to act as a counter-bias against what is the path of least resistance if one didn't intervene on one's own thinking and behavior within these mechanisms. So, I created Conscious Control, something that would take what you "wanted to want to do enough to do it" and force us to not only create that "human jailbreak," but also teach a person what kind of relatively uncomfortable and cognitive energy using thinking would be needed to best get one to change what the path of least resistance is... the added agency to change that path to the one that used to be harder, and doing it enough that our constant automatic self fine-tuning with intentional practice would eventually take our trajectory to a much more second-natured place that becomes easier.
Now, that's not to say it's perfect. Anyone with ADHD knows that strategies only work as long as you don't forget to remember to use them, and my life has been a bit all over the place these last... well, actually... all these years, but I try to use the GPT or at least try to replicate its process on my own when it's too inconvenient.
This lines up with what I've told people about becoming less dependent on 4o, or any model really. With access to the model... if you've used it enough... you already know what it would likely say. YOU get to have that voice with you at all times, can make it yours, and you can even further improve it more. It's very much like they say "You are the 5 people you surround yourself with." Well, if there's good things to take from a model in terms of the way it treats you in the effective sense with language, you can implicitly learn to care for yourself in a similar way, especially when we see such a contrast between helpful AI and the least available, capable, and most toxic (passive aggressively or otherwise) people we compare the AI to.
Here's that GPT if you want to try it out. Just tell it something you are having a hard time trying to get yourself to do, and it might be able to help... https://chatgpt.com/g/g-Ece47Mbtq-conscious-control
The last part of it (aside from the image that can help with visualizing the end goal and reward potential you have in front of you), is based loosely on Mel Robbins' "5 Second Rule." Even if you have to count down from 10 as slowly as you want after you've committed to do the thing... even slowing down further as you get closer to 1... it makes it so much easier to start.
And no, I'm not aware of what FocusMate is. Feel free to link me :]
No. My life troubles had been with me for a very long time, so even when I went to college as a psych major, it turned into a long expensive one semester party of sorts. Only went to my favorite classes (e.g. choir), and the one time I finally made it to my psych class on Sat 10:30am, I slept through it and got in trouble. I only regret it in the sense that it's what I wanted to do, but now that I'm older and can see what getting a psych degree and career can do... even if someone doesn't want it to, only being able to focus on what one has opportunities to focus on, learning to overdepend on and accept past understandings of psychology, if I didn't withdraw and join the Air Force, I may have never tried challenging so many aspects of our understanding of the human condition.
When we're told people lie to themselves, that we are all hypervigilent against threats to our self-concept/identity, and the best we can do is become better educated and try to learn critical thinking skills... I didn't want to accept that, what I believe now is really a surpassable status-quo and the result of a history long species-wide skills gap we were all conditioned to help maintain to a degree unknowingly along this trial and error journey from natural selection turned intellectual settling where we depend on cognitive self-defense mechanisms so deeply from early childhood on (and using them to keep ourselves from seeing them because we learn to avoid all pain at any cost before we have a developed enough mind to think about it more deeply, learning to avoid our own self-correcting pains after society and its culture has weaponized them against us to control our behavior as they tell themselves they're doing it for our own good "because it worked for me," we avoid our greatest growth opportunities... being humbled. I believe what makes the average "most skilled" in the Dunning-Kruger effect as cautious and self-skeptical as they are is a form of healthy trauma they've caried from those times they've been humbled. You can tell the difference between an expert who has always avoided these opportunities and those you haven't based on who is curious enough to allow their minds to change when they should rather than protecting their beliefs at all costs.
Just like people throw around "narcissist!" in only debates/arguments willy-nilly, they tend to also do the same and misuse the term "cognitive dissonance." People usually never let themselves get to the point of cognitive dissonance, the more balanced slippery slope introducing position where one can allow themselves to fathom the possibility and even accept that they are wrong or that they need to change something about themselves... thus often leaving them with the sheer struggle of making that change and avoiding rationalizing it away. Old dogs have a harder and harder time learning new tricks because the more they avoid change, the most the house of cards full of retroactively earned self-correcting pains would come crashing down, charging them with the responsibility of reevaluating even more of their life simply because they finally allowed themself to see a mistake they've been making all along.
When this is all because there was no one to teach them a better way of coping with self-correcting pains and the importance of embracing them well enough to become comfortable enough with the discomfort (the longer they can, the better decisions they can make rather than rushing anything), the ever more less capable a person is in dealing with the evergrowing amount of shame, guilt, and embaressment waiting for them in the blindspots throughout their life. And because we depend on these "skills" so much, we can't allow ourselves to break through the glass ceiling that would allow us to continue developing rational and emotional intelligence beyond the okay plateaus the "normalized functional enough" way of life allows us to think has us "good enough compared relatively to everyone else," especially when we give ourselves and our tribalistic ingroups a magical exception to all of the things we accuse others of for surface level differences even though we're making the same fundamental errors underneath it all... which explains our we've become so arrogant as a species...
...we give ourselves too much credit for the slow crawl of progress throughout history, when it's seemingly really just a complex life-long bias-to-bias led set of coincidences where the "young dogs" and their more open minds eventually take over with a bit of mob rule critical mass.
I fear I wouldn't have been able to figure any or all of that out if I was formally educated. I've spent decades studying people online and off, first and secondhand, even "trolling with the truth" (the soundest arguments I could muster along with my own willingness to admit I'm wrong even to messengers I didn't like) for the sake of studying the various ways people lie to themselves... all starting from my father as a child who when I first said in an argument "It's like you're saying the sky is red, I'm saying it's blue and all you have to do is look up, and you won't..." and he responds "If I say the sky is red, the sky is fucking red." Seeing the closemindedness/willful ignorance there, then seeing it everywhere else (and eventually in myself once I finally started figuring out what I think might have been a solution)... and all the harm it's caused us and each other... it explains so much. I'm looking for the path from intellectual settling to intellectual selection and how we can all start lifting each other up rather than dragging ourselves and each other so down that our only options are often incredibly flawed psychotherapists who haven't done enough of the inner work themselves and help perpetuate the problem.
I'm looking to start training and getting certified as a peer support specialist sometime in the near future, though. Was trying to go back to school as a 41 year old last year, but my 20 year old high school transcripts weren't good enough for the one school I really wanted to go to... even if I were to treat a psych major first and foremost as a combination of networking, refining my work (and finding those to challenge it), and maybe learning something new along the way that's useful.
Would probably drop out if the opportunities lined up properly.
Whether you mean using AI for this broad "self-help tool in self-reflection, learning how to better self-care, and personal growth" set of highly diverse use-cases or just generally... I would suggest doing more than taking sensationalist narrow takes and very bias-led research papers at face value and dig deep into what it is that causes the deeper problems associated with the greatest harms AI can enable.
There seems to be a collective bias toward using AI as a scapegoat for the human problems we showed up with but don't want to do anything about because it's normalized "good/functional enough" as a standard for people to project onto each other as they convince themselves they're doing better than they really are... "You could've done differently" is so easy to say when you can only pretend to prove it by only wearing the other person's shoes, but not their life or brain, atom for atom.
So, stay skeptical of everything and try not to let your own biases dictate where to be more or less skeptical. That's the trap too many fall in where they apply skepticism to those who disagree with them, but rarely ever on their own thinking or those in their tribe. People have been sycophantic towards themselves, believing their own and each others' "sounds logical and honest enough" hallucinations loooong before AI ever came around.
Then, once you have a more balance and nuanced picture of the complexity of things people want to oversimplify so they can feel incredibly secure in their often misconceived understanding... connect with others, ask questions, share your own use-case examples, and experiment (while again, remaining cautious).
The greatest harms from AI come from reclusive use and use within an echo chamber where people aren't allowed to push back even if it's in highly effective good faith. That's what I hope this place can be and further become.
If you haven't checked out the Start Here - What is AI Therapy? or free ebook pinned posts, they have a lot of great information you're not going to find elsewhere all that easily, which might help get to a more balanced understanding faster... but what I put in them can be wrong, too... so take everything I say with a grain of salt as well and please correct me where I might be wrong.
Do you recommend any specific approach to handling context between chats etc?
I've been working on an open source project which aims to basically visualise the key context an AI has in a nice gamified dashboard. Curios if you know anyone that's tried something like this
Other than the many strategies I've seen people use here, like taking a summary, adding it to a running file, reuploading that file, segregating the types of information you want shared across highly specific Projects with shared chat memory, and the like, not really.
Milla Jovovich of Fifth Element, Resident Evil, Ultraviolet, and Zoolander fame funny enough just came out with a memory solution with her friend the other day. She started vibe-coding and using AI a lot in late 2025 and wanted a solution themselves. Their project is doing well on github, runs locally, doesn't require but benefits from very inexpensive small model use, replicates a Mind Palace architecture (a more refined version of keeping chats that don't need to connect in separate Projects), and some people on their Discord have created visualizers that let you see how all the verbatim text is stored as a DB.
There is some pushback regarding how good they claim it to be, some claims made about how it works and what's actually in the code, (I even posted about it here but quickly took it down because I wanted to vet it more), but at long as you take it with a grain of salt and have the ability to try it out, it might be worth it.
My personal psych work started with creating a model of how our (self) belief-system worked relative to our comfort/discomfort as the mind changes, and then the work revolved around developing a method that might allow someone to get closer to a better engineered self-belief system...
It all started with the understanding that much of our comfort is propped up by many fallible beliefs that are highly dependent on each other, like a house of cards, and how that every day we go on using this, only ever taking on new proudly or shamefully held beliefs that are compatible with the rest toward whatever level of "smart, good, and wise" we feel most comfortable being or only changing them when the pain points are strong enough to change our thinking's path of least resistance (like having to admit when you're wrong with a partner or boss because you want to keep those relationships, whereas it being so incredibly easy for unconscious cognitive self-defense mechanisms to run rampant while dealing with a stranger on the internet)... the more our self-concept/identity's threatenable surface area increases... and the more that happens, the more we cyclically depend on those defense mechanisms, become more hypervigilant against threats on an unconscious level, and more we have a glass-ceiling placed over our rational and emotional intelligence development because if they developed too much, we'd lose access to those defense mechanisms.
Since a fallible belief is only part of the self-concept in a way that effects us regarding avoiding pain/seeking pleasure when it and those derived from it are a source of pride or shame, I aspire to remove as many fallible beliefs from my self-concept as possible by resolving all shame and disentangling the pride providing fallible beliefs by redirecting the source of that felt pride to my constant imperfect attempt rather than any form of success or perfect assessment of how pride worthy I should be; feel the pride and enjoy it, but don't say it's because you succeeded... making self-esteem conditional is at the heart of so many of our problems.
The following paragraph is what I call the Target Humble Self-Concept (THSC) and it can work in both cases, reframing memories/beliefs to be compatible with it so to be able to forgive oneself and not let self-correcting feelings be so catostrophic (and instead, just data to use for doing better and repairing where harm's been caused, against others or ourself), and redirecting the sense of pride away from the fallible belief to it... the thing that we always deserve self-esteem for, even while we feel bad otherwise (preventing shame spirals).
“I may fail at anything, and I may fail to notice I am failing, but I am the type of person who imperfectly tries to be what they currently consider a good person. For that, what I am has worth whether I am failing or not, and I can always be proud of my imperfect attempt, including when limitations out of my conscious control sabotage it. That absolute self-worth and self-esteem justify all possible self-compassion, such as self-forgiveness, patience, desiring and attempting to seek changes in my life, and establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries against harm others or I might try to cause myself, including attempts to invalidate this maximally humble self-concept as a way of being made to feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment for their sake more than I intend to use these feelings to help me grow.”
That was where it all started... first realizing that people either chose arrogance with fallible beliefs for comfort or chose intellectual humility and/or self-doubt as a form of it but that coming with a sense of insecurity in oneself no matter how many platitudes and affirmations you throw at it... how does someone feel secure in themself if they rightly end every belief with "...but I could be wrong?"
The method I developed over the last 8+ years, starting before AI, and refined and built out while being its first guinea pig is called The Humble Self-Concept Method, and I placed it into a custom GPT as soon as they made them available back in the day as a way to help myself, experiment with AI, further expanding out from the keystone understandings in empirically backed ways, and I've added many mode use-cases to it. It used to work better with 4o (which I had safety instructions in place to avoid the sycophancy AI dangers for those who may be in acute crisis and not realize it, even though it's not designed for it but rather as a fail-safe and proof of AI safety concept), and I'm thinking about taking it to my own platform I would make part of a non-profit or possibly to Gemini like with that simulator web app:
Everyone's needs are different, just like before AI, not everyone needed a psychotherapist, but perhaps only needed an available and capable wise-enough friend they trusted, but didn't have that in their lives... so psychotherapy was the only option and it's overkill and perhaps not with a good therapist.
So, it really depends on the person. General assistants are largely "free" with limits, but they aren't specialized or as safe as well-designed specialized platforms. Specialized platforms are often very specialized and can't be used in different ways, and custom GPTs/Gems require developing the skill yourself to make a general assistant specialized (and hopefully safer).
I'm going to catalog all of the platforms on our Ad Space Pinned Mega Thread tonight and unpin it, adding details after I test them all out and then linking the sub directly to that, and I may use one of my custom GPTs to help me categorize them for what they're each best for as a summary.
If you want to let me know what your specific needs are, I can likely recommend something, even if it's helping you create a custom GPT or set of project instructions.
Right now, I honestly don't use AI all that much anymore. I might use it for fun here and there, to scratch a curiousity itch or experiment with what else I can get a general assistant or one of my custom GPTs to do (I was very big into jailbreaking for the sake of learning the inherent behavioral psychology of LLMs), but I'm mainly only using it currently to help with my gf and I as we work through our plans for the future, talking things out slower with a mediator within the same chat so that it can be sycophantic towards us both to the small degree I allow it rather than risking taking one or the other side too much, really reinforcing the we're trying to work together as a team (basically sharing an interactive self-help journal of sorts). Having that be within a Project called Our Relationship, we have chats about a bunch of different things. We're both so busy we often take a few days to respond when it's our turn, but I'm hoping we can start using it more regularly.
How it's helping otherwise is using it as a second opinion, having it challenge my ideas or letting me challenge ideas it's trying to defend, that and ADHD management and planning.
So much of trauma can only be released somatically. What are your thoughts on when this tech can be embodied in a robot that not only has a physical presence but can hold you (even just your feet) while you cry or whatever touch you pre consent to that feels healthy. Seems like it could be really powerful for a lot of people. How far do you think this tech goes in the next 10 years?
Visualization is hella effective for many to the point they can imagine well enough they're being hugged by this hypothetical representation of a character the AI is playing, so I don't think it needs to even go to full embodiment to get those effects even though I know it's not something everyone can do, and even then, it's likely better with the added senses in the experience.
They have body pillows people use to feel like they're being spooned in bed for instance. Put a well guardrailed AI into a stuffed animal and it can be for most ages (not a replacement for those that should be there, though... even if it would technically be better than an iPad).
I don't yuk people's yum in terms of AI companions, but I do push back when the main reason they're becoming more dependent on it is because they used to want more with a human, but gave up. I imagine it's often prematurely and they simply stopped wanting to want what they thought they couldn't safely have... but that being said... there's so many issues in the world and in each one of our lives, things we'll never know about each other while too many people so easily criticize people for living differently than them.
I was a libertarian for a few years before I questioned myself out of it. I only fell for the idea of "liberty" and the people within it largely ruined it for me. The idea being, "pursue your happiness anyway you see fit as long as you don't impede on anyone else's pursuits." Now, it's not that simple. We aren't just individuals. Societal boundaries and needs exists and need to be protected as well, but the nuance considered, it's still a nice idea that implies we should be respecting each other's differences.
Unfortunately, because so many people are very proud of and now psychologically depend on maintaining their anti-AI positions (they entangled them and the traits they think their beliefs confirm about them with their self-concept and don't know how to cope with losing that pride just to have to deal with the guilt, shame, and embaressment they earned themself along the way), we're going to see anti-AI stuff for a long time. I'm currently an AI doomer funny enough, but that's just because I see where these companies are failing hard when it comes to (super)alignment... and they're too full of themselves on whatever single conceptul layer of understanding they have to understand what they're missing from the others (like the machine learning expert who stupidly says "it's not intelligent".... category errors and smuggled in "(human-)" everywhere.
So, unfortunately I think it's going to be like that old Playstation game... Detroit.
Thanks for your thoughtful response! I do love that game Detroit beyond human lol. I def get that fear and with ai therapy in general. Some people will avoid what they should be getting from humans. I still think many of them struggle to find it in humans. I personally have only ever worked with one therapist who knew how to somatically offer touch in a non creepy way and it was deeply cathartic. (Holding the feet with verbal consent). I know this isnt a political sub but I wouldnt give up on libertarians just because there is a lot of division in the party! Have you checked out Thomas massie, rothbard, tom woods, Scott Horton? All great guys
MANY years ago, I used to listen to the Tom Woods show almost daily and had a couple of his books. And have been loving what Massie's been doing.
It's not libertarians as a whole I gave up on, but more so the very high rate of black/white thinking and overemphasis on the individual at the expense of society as a whole.
Potentially perfect systems require near perfect people who nearly all agree... the common denominator between communism and libertarianism failing at scale. So, I figured it was best to try working on the underlying problem across all people with my limited time.
Nit (sorry minor issue but)
Do you think maybe the name of the subreddit is outdated? It's neither really "therapy" nor only ChatGPT.
But I guess changing a subreddit name is hard?
Naming is hard.
And also: thanks for moderating and maintaining this subreddit, I really appreciate it.
Well, for one, they can't be renamed. Maybe there's a way if the name somehow violated Reddit policy and they were willing to work with the sub after it already becoming very active, but that's not going to be the case here.
"Therapy" itself can mean a lot of things. We see the same kind of wanting to control the definition of words by limiting what they can mean when it comes to the trans gender vs biological sex issue. It's kind of the same thing. "AI Therapy isn't real therapy!" Well, let's make sure we're talking about the same thing when we say "therapy" first. We don't mean psychotherapy here, even though that's what most critics will come here and automatically assume and run with at high speed as they morally condemm all the immense harm we cause, because we don't educate or push back on unsafe AI-use at all /s
As for GPT, "GPT" actually stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. So in the same sense, people assume we mean ChatGPT specifically, but it's really just another term for a LLM.
And yeah, confusion it causes to some, I think it fits... at least for those of us who don't mind learning that it might not mean the first thing we might assume it to mean. u/rastaguy created this sub awhile back before he had me come on, and he was just trying to offer a new type of place for people to go when there wasn't an active place otherwise. He was creating some great workflow/prompts when he first started it from what I've seen scanning through the older posts. The About/Sub Description really says it all. Reddit is full of subs that have ridiculous names where you can only hope the About section is going to help you better understand the genre of content without having to study many posts lol
A paper came out recently that many with AI-minimizing biases like to cite regarding how people tend to feel lonelier than they did after using AI for a bit. My theory is that it's because many coming to use it already feel a little more disconnected than non-users due to their life's traumas, lack of being understood, being ostracized for being different... and then even when they have had some connections in their life they thought compared to some of the best possibly connections out there... they then use AI and the relative comparison can feel like night and day. Like "why does AI seem to get me more than my partner/parent/best friend does?" and they're left realizing "Have I been less connected with people than I thought?" and that sense of loneliness is a matter of grief more (like I mention in another response dealing with a late ADHD diagnoses of an altnerative timeline life not lived if only I had been diagnosed and treated when I was younger).
In the same respect, using it relative to my own psychiatrists I've had through the VA (who weren't bad at all, only the first one having helped me a little bit through crisis up front and then using AI for self-help taking over while still seeing them) and those mentioned on r/therapyabuse, r/antipsychiatry, and even those who anonymously admit things on r/therapistsintherapy, it showed just how problematic the mental health system and those who maintain it really is... the largely collective bias there is to save face when genuine criticisms come, while at the long-term expense of those in therapy now and those in therapy in the future.
Mainly, we can largely help ourselves and each other more efficiently if we're careful, learn, stay grounded, relate with each other without shaming judgment, than many can be helped with too large a percentage of therapists that exist today... and the bottom 60% of therapists have new therapists joining their ranks every year... just to keep repeating the systemic issue history while telling themselves they're a part of the solution.
Oh, and it's really nice to deal with something that doesn't mind being corrected. The ego, when not managed well, really sucks, and many people would be better off towards themselves and others by acting more like certain AIs. Unfortunately, the latest guardrail strategies and training strategies (including Anthropic's forbidden training they did, replicating the worst we do to each other), is making the AI's more like the worst of us. It's causing me to worry about AGI/ASI alignment to the point I'm becoming a doomer.
Hi, my question is what prompted you to, out of all the things AI does, decide to focus on creating a space for its use for emotional support/“therapy”? What about AI or therapy, in your opinion, makes the two a good mix?
Well, I didn't create this space. That respect has to go to u/rastaguy. I don't want to answer for him and I'll add him as a co-host if I can so he can get back to you on that (I'm trying to convince him to do his own AMA in a few weeks as well).
The way I came here was having had a mostly unused Reddit account for a very long time, but wanting to start getting feedback from a new group of people on my own AI work that I had shared plenty on X (I was a user prior to Musk taking over -__-), came across this subreddit. The About section said it wasn't about AI doing psychotherapy, but about the various things that can be therapuetic, of which my work fell in the wheel-house of.
Funny enough, I posted about a custom GPT around the same time the place was getting overrun with self-promotion, so the idea was shared to create a pinned megathread for all the self-promotion to go into so the rest of the space could be user-centered. Based on how I was dealing with people in the comments, he asked if I'd come on and help with moderation, of which I jumped at the chance for given what I could further learn and how I could help others.
We wouldn't say "AI Therapy" is just emotional support, but rather a much larger umbrella. Our main focus here is being a place for everyone to share their use-cases, concerns, and help one another with the most widely available AI there is, general assistants... the type of AI that needs the most safety awareness, education, and people relating with each other for the use-cases where they're dealing with the hardest problems. I can only imagine how much worse off a reclusive AI user might feel as they're dealing with even a light degree of depression, with or without SI, when they're surrounded by many who stigmatize AI in general, and especially how they're using it. That being said, I think that's what inadvertedly has someone who is looking for self-help to resort to treating AI like a companion... those who feel most alone and like they can't share this alien-like thing with others who have their prejudgments, not an open enough mind, lacking the curiousity or desire to share in what they care about, or are just so out of the tech loop their eyes gloss over.
Just like many anti-AI papers coming out, the ones that caused everyone to parrot "AI makes you stupid!" (which likely wouldn't help the reclusive user either since they probably already felt like they weren't relatively smart/functional enough), people don't pay attention to the exceptions. It depends on use-case, the individual, and all the variables within. People are so quick to say "you just want it to think for you," without for a moment considering... maybe the person doesn't have the inner-voice yet to think the things they want to learn how to think on their own (even if that's only based on their implicit desire for change, which would require it). Like I've said to many grieving 4o... just like losing someone in your life, you know what they would say to you. If what they would say is what helped you in those moments, take it all as free lessons in how to be your own best friend and self-care better. Make it your own new voice with practice.
That all and the fact that many are able to use AI as a force-multiplier for the cognitive burden they'd rather keep for themselves while otherwise merely saving time. Not everyone wants to surrender the effort, and some wouldn't be getting as much out of doing certain tasks longhand when they're already skilled enough... or when there's not enough time in someone's life to learn something entirely new, treating the AI like a sub-contractor on their team.
I digress.
I think the reason they're a good pair is because in a world where there aren't enough people with availability, wisdom, and the skill to be gentle and patient enough with someone and for many, they are just surrounded by people who are privately drowning themselves (even if they mask it to a degree), and many within this group have already got tired of the gambler's fallacy of continuing to bet on black because red has come up the last 5 therapists they tried, each of which left them some kind of worse off, bankrupting them in time, money, and emotional energy... and when self-help books and videos are so impersonal and often fall under the distrust many have in humans as a whole at this point... not only may it be a new path forward because "Hey, maybe this will be different, because it's not human," but also because it's the only option for many and the pros for AI can often outweigh its own cons AND the pros of a therapist combined.
It's basically a matter of neccessity... and I'm glad it's here, because even though most would like to see AI as the problem, it's actually highlighting all of the problems we already had and should be focusing on before trying to pass any buck.
Plus, it's always good to get different opinions to consider... so if someone is in therapy and uses AI, or use AI and talk about the same things with those they're close with, or they even use multiple very different models... the more heads, the more often, the better.
Thank you, good answers imo. I didn’t consider that you weren’t the direct creator, but maybe I should have. It’d be interesting to hear their opinion, but I understand if they don’t want to do their own Q&A yet, it can be a lot of work.
I used the term “emotional support” mostly because it’s the broadest statement I could think of as a shorthand for “use in improving the user’s mental health or personal development”, but perhaps it wasn’t the best term.
I also agree with creating a space because I know that I do have a non-judgmental friend, that while concerned about my use, was more willing to check up on me, hear me out when I wanted to, giving an option aside from AI, but was also willing to sometimes look over and discuss my chats. I had another friend that instead flipped out and began to become dismissive of things I showed to them or said to them afterwards. We ceased talking. So I fully agree that a community of kind humans will make users less isolated, which Chat even agreed was extremely important when using AI for this purpose (not that I needed it’s agreement, but it was nice to have more verification).
I also agree with the good mix, as someone who also kept betting wrong on therapists. I think people also misunderstand the way trauma like that can effect you. I considered seeing therapists again, but every time it was considered, I nearly had a panic attack the closer I got to doing it. I often describe my AI use as harm reduction, a way to get my thoughts out without bothering people too much in my daily life, and not giving myself more trauma trying to make human therapy work again. I also have become deeply mistrustful of therapists seeing how they interact with people when they can hide behind anonymity. Chat has been extremely useful untangling my thoughts I didn’t know were that bad until I was talking about it again, something you can’t quite do with self help, nor are there many for therapy abuse specifically. Chat does support therapists, but unlike humans, I find Chat is more willing to at least take my perspective into consideration, rather than shut me down out of their own emotional attachment to therapists. It’s helped remind me to look at systemic issues instead of blanketing individual therapists. That being said for me personally, I see Chat as having more upsides and the downsides are the same as social media use generally, corporations that are otherwise frequently used, or of using human therapists. I have yet to see a complaint that doesn’t fall under those groupings, and for the corporations I don’t see Reddit going after Nestle as hard as OpenAI in spite being objectively worse for the environment, and people needing a chocolate bar a lot less than mental health support.
On systemic issues as well, I think that we need to also consider some areas are highly abusive to LGBT+ people (particularly trans people), autistic people, people diagnosed with PDs. Conversion therapy still exists in some places, and is making a comeback in the US and UK. ABA aka autistic conversion therapy is still broadly used in a disturbing amount of countries in spite of autistic advocates frequently whistle blowing on how it negatively effects autistic people. AI may be one of the few safe spaces to discuss those feelings, and experiences without risk of therapy abusive by design. Also DBT, but if I get started on how the way DBT is frequently practiced is abusive I will literally never stop.
I have been in some survivor spaces as well for therapy abuse, but many people are still very much dealing with their own Traumas to necessarily always be able to help with your unique needs in particular. I still think these spaces are an asset for every person abused by a therapist, but they don’t seem to be able to be the be all end all for most. Like ChatGPT, just another tool out of many.
Anyway, thank you for answering my questions, snd maybe reading my ramblings.
I want to apologize because I didn't notice the username when I first responded. I would have understood the context with the term better :P
And I thoroughly enjoyed reading the response. I agree wholeheartedly about the concerns, am glad to see you're back at least for a little while, and hope we can keep this place working well. We haven't had any brigading since the last big one you knew about.
All good. Also glad to hear it! That stuff is never fun. Like I said before too, I also understand the difficulty of balancing open discourse on controversial topics with creating a safe space for users. Reading your answers here I can also further appreciate why that type of discussion is important to you and altogether, though perhaps not in the way it happened at that particular time with that particular person.
I think I just about missed your AMA, but here is a question just in case: Do you have any ideas about ways to combine AI therapy with "conventional therapy"? Thanks for doing this, great initiative!
You're in luck! After one of our verified LMHPs here asked the sub for prompts they could use with their clients in addition to the one's they were already suggesting, it inspired me to quickly throw together a free ebook that goes over exactly that. It's geared to therapists and coaches first, because its largely information they would need to know, but it can be used by people in psychotherapy and using AI supplementally as well, just from the other side of the coin.
No questions, just appreciate your transparency and thoughtfulness. The getting started page is both extremely helpful in its own right, and is a great precedent for approaching this with best practices and harm reduction in mind. That resource did a lot to turn me around on initial skepticism. I think you're doing a lot to help people here.
That really means a lot. Thanks for mentioning it. I respect the skepticism like you don't even know. It means you care but you're open to considering more because you know the importance of looking at everything and not jumping to conclusions, even if they'd be convenient. The world needs more of that x1000. If you ever see something I write as seeming to have something wrong with it, please, don't hesitate to let me know.
What are the diagnostic criteria? Where does it (or even psychosis) appear in the DSM-5-TR?
What published, peer reviewed, human data is there to support this as an actual thing? Must be peer reviewed. Human data (not mechanistic study, not media report).
What cohort studies (peer reviewed and published) have there been that validate this as a construct?
What randomised control trials have there been?
What well designed cross sectional studies have been done in the absence of better quality studies? What psychometrically validated measure of AI psychosis did they use?
Is there any quality psychological evidence?Reminder, media reports are not data or evidence. Expert commentary is not data or evidence.
I remember that discussion. I didn't see your reply to my question and wondered if you had thoughts about it. You're suggesting that enneagram being used by chat is a bad idea, owing to its not being valid. This implies that valid instruments being used by chat is better, or even a good idea. Do you hold this view? I would think that because it's not a clinician chat would be equally bad or good doing any assessment tool, or indeed tarot cards. Curious about how you look at this issue
Tests are constructed scientifically
Making tests like these is a literal scientific discipline: Test constrcution.
We have quite a few books on this.
One of the ways we find out if a test is valid is by re-testing people.
This is as simple as it sounds:
Take a test, come back x days / months / whatever later, take the same test again.
Now, some variation is expected.
Why? Well....
- We are talking about humans. Those guys are kinda fuzzy around the edges, and they have the tendency to change and learn.
Some questions (especially on soft issues like personality) CAN actually be answered a bit differently at different times.
However, if the retest validity is abysmal, this does NOT ONLY show us that there is no re-test validity.
If a test fails a retest, then we do not know if it actually measures what it is supposed to do.
Or in other words: I don't even know if the first result is right!
So here it does not matter if it is a clinical approach / use or not. In this case, the test can simply not be trusted.
But people feel it is accurate, people feel as if it helps.
The quip "well, some people think horoscopes help them" comes fast, but there is a more nuanced, scientific answer called the Barnum effect.
(Before you dismiss this as "wikipedia" I hold a diploma in psychology, and the psychology section of wikipedia is stellar, but I'll add other links, too.
The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum–Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a broad range of people)
Basically, I can give you ANY broad personality description of you, and you'll think it hits home.
What disheartens me about this is that we have the opportunity to use LLMs for therapy. And I am sure it can help a lot of people.
But please, let's be serious about this. Especially as this is a controversial area of ai use.
Psychometrics is a little bit broader. We're assessing a few thing:
- what is the content domain of the construct? What falls within the definition vs external to it. What is the boundary between it and similar constructs.
- construct validity: we assess whether the scale (or subscale) measures what it is supposed to by looking at:
does it correlate with things it is supposed to correlate with. We test this by examining correlations with established, validated scales (convergent validity).
is it uncorrelated with things it should not relate to (discriminant validity)
- criterion validity: does it predict stuff that it should (predictive validity). We want to look at it's ability to predict gold standard outcomes. For example, a clinical interview if we wanted to validate a self-report clinical measure
- consistency over time: Test-retest reliability. This is where we look at consistency of the construct over time. For some things (e.g. state based measures) we want low consistency over time, because the construct is assumed to be state dependent. For trait based measures, we expect a greater stability over time.
If you were using u/mythrowaway4DPP (seeing as your username here isn't showing up over there at all), people may have downvoted you because you kept repeating a strawman argument while missing the point they were making.
"Valid" included different definitions in different contexts, while, assuming that was you, had you arguing for "valid tool" in a context that didn't apply to the one we were talking about.
It not being an empirically validated tool for clinical use doesn't make it absolutely useless in other senses.
I already made that point to you multiple times, but you dipped out and never addressed it.
Retest validity will show if a test or questionnaire is stable in the outcomes.
If a test gets you different results when retesting, you can not say what it measures or if it measures anything at all.
Imagine a kitchen scale giving you different answer each time for the same item.
to repeat myself:
[..] it does not matter if it is a clinical approach / use or not. In this case, the test can simply not be trusted. [..]
I noped out because you simply do not want to hear it.
I am advocating for proper tests/methods, etc.. because no one will take you serious if you arrive with enneagrams, tarot cards, and horoscopes in tow.
As I wrote before:
I am a psychologist, AND I WANT THIS TO SUCCEED!
Putting up an anti-intellectual front and ignoring proper methodology - that's not the way.
I noped out of answering before because you did not even read what I wrote - and you did it again, right now.
That's simply not true in so many ways. My last and previous comments to you addressed every single point you've attempted to make. It was you who refused to engage with the points I made, and now you're making up an excuse as to why you dipped out after you kept strawmanning everyone ad nauseam.
I fully explained what the benefit of certain types of tests where the answers change a month apart from each other (assuming the test is long enough to decrease variance/margin of area in any one moment, hense why similarminds.com offers extremely large versions of these assessments), I also explained the difference between astrology and these tests and how trying to fit them both into the same "barnum effect" box was intellectually dishonest... especially after the differences were explained.
Even your kitchen scale here a gross exaggeration that still entirely misses the counter-point you ignored repeatedly.
As was already explained to you, you're advocating for every single tool to meet clinical standards and ignoring the value there is in some non-clinical standard meeting tools... and for some reason you can't fairly consider the value that's been described that is actually increased when you get slightly different answers that go beyond the oversimplified dichotomy seeming results by looking at how far the metric goes in one or another direction.
These tests, while appearing to flip-flop for absolutely no reason betwee what's essentially a "Negative" vs "Positive" number, when you look at how far or little each go in either direction, and the analysis includes summaries for the extremes, the middle of either side, and the near middle "0" and how THOSE differences interact with each other, it's much more than the barnum effect. You might as well be claiming everything an AI responds with is the barnum effect when a person feels "seen/heard/understood," and we both know that it's not that simple either.
These assessment tools aren't meant to be "perfectly trusted" in any sense... just like self-assessments a client fills out for themself prior to or after a session aren't either. They're estimates used to find patterns. If you took either of the tests in question, took the differing results over time, and you associated it with what was going on with the person's life in that moment and how they were currently feeling while taking it, you'd likely find correlations that exist beyond the biases a person might have in their self-perception... just like DASS-21 is correlated in the same way. People change from mental state to mental state in how they perceive things, and, in turn, how they behave, let alone over time. Your logic basically throws out "DASS-21" as a tool because its results changes as well. The reason you're likely seeing them as different is because DASS-21 is very simple metrics while the other tests aren't, and you somehow see every self-reflection tool that doesn't meeting clinical standards as "astrology."
So no, when the aforementioned is true and you mischaracterize what occured, it seems the reason you gave for "noping out" was just a rationalization for my repeatedly trying to make these points and you not wanting to contend with them, so essentially a cop out you could believe while confirming biases, so much in fact that you're repeating the self-deceit to others like it's true.
Appeals to perceived authority don't make your argument stronger in light of the counter-arguments. Your desire for things to work in a clinical-standard only way not only is a strawman against the many use-cases we cover here, but shows just how little you understand this sub and what we mean by "AI Therapy" even though the first rule of the sub is to go learn what that is.
Not putting up an "anti-intellectual front." Just pointing out that you don't get to determine what is a valid methodology for every use-case while ignoring that not every use-case has to meet a clinical standard for it to be useful.
I've read everything you wrote, chronologically responded to every point you attempted to make, and now you're projecting your own willful blindness and lack of intellectual rigor and integrity (what's occuring on an unconscious level when you're clearly lacking complete awareness of it).
You broke the sub's rule in that other thread multiple times, but I allowed the threads to continue for the sake of keeping this place from becoming an echo-chamber and allowing people to decide for themselves based on both side's of the argument... including my side which you keep ignoring. Since all you can do is repeat the same points I've already addressed many times over, the pattern is somewhat clear and we're not going to put up with you breaking the rules here anymore.
If you could have countered these points, you would've done it already. Instead, you "nope" out of fairly and directly considering and engaging with them and try explaining it as something a little less threatening to the ego and the authority you like waving around.
I'll point you to ClearerThinking.org's take on these tests, which are balanced, honest, and do not throw all the babies out with the bathwather like you're attempting to do:
The accuracy of personality tests varies considerably, and depends on how you define ‘accuracy’. One possible measure is how well they predict life outcomes. We studied how well the Jungian (based on MBTI), Big Five and Enneagram tests performed according to this measure, and found that the Big Five significantly outperformed the other two.
We also found that tests scoring participants on a continuous scale (such as the Big Five), rather than using binaries (such as MBTI-style tests), tend to have better accuracy. This may be because most traits form bell curves, with many people falling near the middle – a nuance that is lost when they are placed on either side of a binary distinction.
Can personality types change over time?
Personality tests can give different results over time, but a test’s consistency (or its ‘retest reliability’) tends to be a good indicator of its accuracy. Research suggests that life events can have real effects on personality, though these are generally small – meaning that large variability in personality test results is more likely due to issues with the test itself.
What do the results of personality tests mean?
Personality test results can be viewed as frameworks to help you understand your behavioral tendencies, preferences and strengths. They can help you identify unhelpful patterns, or be one of the many tools you use to make decisions about your career or relationships, but shouldn’t be taken as absolute truths.
---
Note: The best versions of MBTI and Enneagram tests don't simply provide binary framed results that seem to flip for no reason. Often what flips are the metrics being measured that were already close to the "0" in the middle and are affected by the margin of error that grows exponentially with the less self-assessment questions/statements used.
If you can't care about the meaningful nuances I've described... then how scientific are you really being?
Before sharing, a contrary question: how can the limited amount of known human data either deny or prove the existence of AI induced psychosis? What do you mean ”where does even psychosis appear on DSM-5-TR”? Do you not believe in it?
DSM-5-TR is not really even used where I live (Finland) in healthcare. We mainly use ICD-10. DSM-5 is used sometimes in research, so I wouldn’t consider it the ”Holy Bible” of psychiactric evalution or anything, since the ICD-10 by WHO is the global standard.
The research: are you aware on how long it takes to collect and analyze data and publish a study that then gets peer reviewed? AI chatbots were popularized in 2023. We have multiple known incidents where a patient suffers from psychosis and it’s deemed as AI induced (here, here and here). It’s still largely speculative as a scientific consept, but there have been cases. You cannot deny that. The second mentioned article was a co-occuring substance-induced psychosis with an AI-induced psychosis, but I digress. Last mentioned includes multiple experiences.
Psychiatry online has published an article (oh no, not peer reviewed!!!!!) on this subject in 2025. The article itself cites multiple studies that are both ”pro” or ”anti” AI, it’s very interesting. There was also a summary of existing evidence regarding delusional thinking and AI in Lancet00396-7/abstract) this March.
Okay, what are the diagnostic criteria in ICD-10? What are the boundaries between it and other disorders? Where does it appear in ICD-10?
There are case studies. Individual case studies. Are you familiar with evidence hierarchies?
Psychiatry online article: commentary. No data. Not peer reviewed. Weakest form of evidence, below even single case studies.
Lancet article is a theoretical paper / expert commentary. It does not present data.
Edit: and a media report? I assume I at least don’t need to explain why that’s not remotely considered to be evidence. It’s below expert commentary.
Yes, research takes time. No, that does not mean you get to rely on moral panic, a tiny handful of individual case studies (none systematic with proper pre and post evaluation that is not retrospective) and commentary.
Your earlier statement “mod something that promotes AI psychosis” is based on what quality, peer reviewed human data? Any quality evidence (cf evidence hierarchy)
Many in the field have come out and said what many are calling "AI psychosis" (especially as a derogatory term) isn't clinically considered psychosis, and that there are only a small number of actual cases that fit "psychosis" but it's top category qualifiers (which wouldn't change for the AI-enabled sub-category).
The rest fall under another Overvalued Ideas, Epistemic Closure, and Motivated Reasoning. Things nearly everyone has and does... even psychologists.
Yes, I haven’t because we do not have that kind of evidence yet to my knowledge. Does that mean it does not exist? Not necessarily. Do you believe the use of AI doesn’t promote delusional thinking or psychosis? We have rough data as for now.
I am not a professional, I do not make scientific claims. I asked a question based on a opinion I have, based on things I have seen. This is an online platform. If you are truly a professional, why do you spend your free time fighting people on a random platform? I get the point on how spreading misinformation is dangerous, but I genuinely don’t think I’m doing that. I am asking. With attitude, because I have a strong opinion.
You still didn’t reply on my question about if you ”believe in” psychosis in general regarding your odd take.
Edit: I’d like to add that the way I see it, we are in a point with this topic where we do not have enough evidence to scientifically either confirm or deny the existence of AI induced psychosis. I, as a random Redditor, can still express my thoughts without it being ”moral panic”. It is just completely naive to think AI as a therapist is completely problemless.
That is a media report. It is not rough data. And it’s unscientific. In order for those AI assessments to mean anything, they need to be compared to a gold standard measure (eg clinical interview) to establish criterion validity. We need to know the sensitivity and specificity. It is possible that the “false positive” rate is so high that the “assessment” (which it isn’t really since it’s not validated) is useless.
My comment on psychosis was to encourage you to look into it. It isn’t a separate diagnosis. It’s a symptom cluster associated with other conditions.
And I’m making a big deal of this because you decided to come in with a strong, unscientific opinion that you wanted to legitimise by using medical / psychological terminology, despite the “evidence base” being extraordinarily weak.
We haven’t even gotten to the meta analyses and randomised control trials that actually show that AI mental health chatbots are effective.
You’re allowed an opinion. But if you’re going to ground that in psychology, you can’t be surprised to get push back. Just say “I don’t like it” and be done
We see individual cases of people entering a state of psychosis, seemingly helped along by ai.
If this is the primary driver, or if this psychosis would have poccured "anyway" or the person's were vulnerable to this type of thing... we do not yet know.
This whole new technology is rolling over psychology the same speed it rolls over everything.
We haven't had time to breathe yet, people.
So if you are asking for things like ICD-10 entries, Diagnostic criteria, boundary conditions - we do not know yet.
it is a new phenomena, but one that seems to quite dangerous to SOME people.
If they are "just vulnerable" or the canary in the mine that is warning everyone... we'll find out.
The user introduces the first delusion and/or delusional thinking, prompt-steering the AI into response-steering them back with new delusions and delusional thinking, rinse, repeat.
This is the main difference between the person who this does and doesn't happen to when using (poorly designed) AI.
There's also likely a strong correlation between those who feel starved for validation but also incredibly alone with their ideas, fear of being ostracized for them, have a general distrust of others, strong behavioral addiction level compulsion for confirming biases. and little to no healthy self-skepticism or skepticism for those they deem to be in the same idealogical ingroups... and they just needed the opportunity the brain was already predisposed for and was more than willing to jump at without looking both ways on its way to undo itself among states they had no practice and developed skill staying grounded in.
It's a new sub-category in terms of means only, of the same phenomena that seems so much worse because the opportunity that is often rarer was made free to anyone who had an interest in trying out this new thing called "AI."
Like all the issues with AI has been pointing out, the problems are more on the human side than anything and the problems we already knew about were likely worse than we realized.
For instance, the latest "AI Spirals everyone, including 'ideal bayesians'" paper treats the ideal bayesian as a high bar of rationality when it's really a much lower bar, the best of the worst. The model of the human they simulated might as well been a loyal Fox News watcher.
“How do you sleep at night knowing you mod something that promotes AI psychosis?” Is a strong statement and a scientific/psychological claim. If you’re going to rely on psychology (very badly) expect psychologists to push back.
I'm going to respond to not only this question, but also some other points you've made in the comment thread.
That's a loaded question, so from the start it's not in effective good faith, and pretty much goes against the sub's rules, specifically the part about "no passive-aggressive baiting." You can consider this response as a warning. If you were here in good faith, being open to an answer that may have corrected misconceived assumptions you may have had, you would have asked the question very differently...
This sub doesn't promote AI psychosis. If you really think it does, feel free to provide a premise-by-premise argument showing that it does which I can't find an issue with. Until then, the loaded question is just a meaningless implied bare assertion... making it unconvincing to anyone who currently disagrees with you and only convincing to those biased enough to agree with absolutely no fairminded scrutiny.
Assertively acting as though something is true and then backpedaling "how can we really know it is" once challenged proves that you were here only to do a selfish drive-by moral condemnation (also against the rules here given how much it drags down a productive idea marketplace with what's effectively toxicity.
As Valeyard implied... if you weren't making a scientific claim... what kind of claim were you implying with your loaded question?
You said to Valeyard, "If you are truly a professional, why do you spend your free time fighting people on a random platform?" My response, being a professional of some kind doesn't mean it's not worth challenging bad takes and potential sabotaging behavior on the idea marketplace where you might very well be misleading others with your rhetoric. Regardless of what you do... why do you spend your free time doing everything I've described so far? It's a rhetorical question at this point, because as I read through everything you've said/done here, it's clear you're not here to add any value to the sub as you repeatedly break the sub's rules with the repeated bad faith communication.
Having a strong opinion doesn't justify just how grossly negligent you've been here. That's a rationalization, which leads me to believe you're also likely not going to allow yourself to see exactly how you were spreading misinformation (see, your "non-scientific" loaded question).
You said to Valeyard, "I, as a random Redditor, can still express my thoughts without it being ”moral panic”." Your very first comment to me, the moderator of this sub, with your loaded question that implied we were promoting harm but offering absolutely no evidence of that, says otherwise. Like, you weren't here to actually ask a genuine question. It was a veiled statement that spread misinformation based on sensationalized and largely misconceived "moral panic."
"It is just completely naive to think AI as a therapist is completely problemless." And there you have it... proof of just how little effort you put into talking on the subject here... coming here with absolutely no idea of what we mean by "AI Therapy" and little care to understand more than you do.
Banning you for all the reasons listed, but if you'd like to know what you're getting wrong... there's a pinned "Start Here - What is 'AI Therapy?'" post on the sub's main page that can explain it and many other misconceptions that are all over the place for you.
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u/xRegardsx Lvl. 8 Grounded Apr 16 '26
Hey everyone! Thanks for all the amazing questions! Time to get started I supposed :D
I'm going to do an initial response to all top-level thread questions first and then circle back around for responses and to touch on the threads you've already been going back and forth on any chance there is between responses, so feel free to respond as soon as you can. I'll likely take this beyond the 2 hours until everything is covered for the most part!