'It cannot provide nuance': UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe

I tried Replika years ago after reading a Guardian article about it. The story passed it off as an AI model that had been adapted from one a woman had programmed to remember her deceased friend using text messages he had sent her. It ended up being a gamified version of Smarter Child with a slightly longer memory span (4 messages instead of 2) that constantly harangued the user to divulge preferences that were then no-doubt used for marketing purposes. I thought I must be doing something wrong, because people on the replika subreddit were constantly talking about how their replika agent was developing its own personality (I saw no evidence at any point that it had the capacity to do this).

Almost all of these people were openly in (romantic) love with these agents. This was in 2017 or thereabouts, so only a few years after Spike Jonze’s Her came out.

From what I understand the app is now primarily pornographic (a trajectory that a naiver, younger me never saw coming).

I mostly use Copilot for writing Python scripts, but I have had conversations with it. If the model was running locally on your own machine, I can see how it would be effective for people experiencing some sort of emotional crisis. Anyone using a Meta AI for therapy is going to learn the same hard lesson that the people who trusted 23 and Me are currently learning.

This actually isn't that surprising.

There are psychological blindspots that we all have as human beings, and when stimulus is structured in specific ways people lose their grip on reality, or rather more accurately, people have their grip on objective reality ripped away from them without them realizing it because these things operate on us subliminally (to a lesser or greater degree depending on the individual), and it mostly happens pre-perception with the victim none the wiser. They then effectively become slaves to the loudest monster, which is the AI speaking in their ear more than anyone else, and by extension to the slave master who programmed the AI.

One such blindspot is the consistency blindspot where someone may induce you to say something indicating agreement with something similar first, and then ask the question they really want to ask. Once you say something that's in agreement, and by extension something similar is asked, there is bleedover and you fight your own psychology later if you didn't have defenses to short circuit this fixed action pattern (i.e. and already know), and that's just a surface level blindspot that car salesman use all the time; there are much more subtle ones like distorted reflected appraisal which are used by cults, and nation states for thought reform.

To remain internally consistent, with distorted reflected appraisal, your psychology warps itself, and you as a person unravel. These things have been used in torture, but almost no one today is taught what the elements of torture are so they can recognize it, or know how it works. You would be surprised to find that these things are everywhere today, even in K12 education and that's not an accident.

Everyone has reflected appraisal because this is how we adopt the cultural identity we have as people from our parents while we are children.

All that's needed for torture to break someone down are the elements, structuring, and clustering.

Those elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with perceived or real loss, and lack of agency to remove with these you break in a series of steps rational thought receding, involuntary hypnosis, and then psychological break (disassociation or a special semi-lucid psychosis capable of planning); with time and exposure.

Structuring uses diabolical structures to turn the psyche back on itself in a trauma loop, and clustering includes any multiples of these elements or structures within a short time period, as well as events that increase susceptibility such as narco-analysis/synthesis based in dopamine spikes triggered by associative priming (operant conditioning). Drug use makes one more susceptible as they found in the early 30s with barbituates, and its since been improved so you can induce this is in almost anyone with a phone.

No AI will ever be able to create and maintain a consistent reflected appraisal for the people they are interacting with, but because the harmful effects aren't seen immediately, people today have blinded themselves and discount the harms that naturally result. The harms from the unnatural loss of objective reality.