people feel lonely as fuck right now, and frankly i'd rather have people soothe it with an ai chatbot they parasocially love than as road rage or being a dick to the restaurant staff or many of the worse and more fatal outlets...
The article goes on to state that the rugpull on their AI girlfriends meant that a sub-Reddit dedicated to the Replika AI has a permanently stickied thread about resources for mental health and suicide hotlines.
I'd rather people didn't kill themselves, personally.
>I'd rather people didn't kill themselves, personally.
well then you need both sides of the picture.
Is there a degree of loneliness staved off by these services? Does that help to reduce suicides?
It's easy to say "people killed themselves because X shutdown", it's more difficult to say "X existing is preventing suicides" without more research.
I tend to believe that if people who would consider suicide otherwise are distracted by something along the path then perhaps that is a good thing. It could very well be that this served as a distraction for those folks, rather than being the cause itself.
Most of mental health treatment is a band-aid, and this is true anywhere in the world & no matter how much money you have. Causes are often unknown and when treatment like medications work we often don't know why they work.
The implication here isn't that the treatment is a band-aid, it's that an LLM being an acceptable substitution for not being able to access a real human therapist due to money is a band-aid on a flawed healthcare system.
Like so many people on HN, they want to throw technological solutions at social problems.
And this is one of those situations where you don't go tearing off bandages without sutures in hand. Something not being a complete solution is not a good argument for eliminating it, until such a solution exists.
