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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

I’m well aware of the risks. But I think you have an unrealistically rosy picture of professionals’ diagnoses.

Replacing expert opinion with engagement-baiting content from feed machines and hallucinating matrices seems to me is a part of the problem, and not the solution.

Especially using TikTok to try and improve mental health issues seems a bit like trying to fight fire with a (edit: spelling) hose of jet fuel.

Sometimes it’s exactly the right medicine. :)

I very much think you're wrong

There's certainly no shortage of issues with the mental health professional field, that much is true. I hope you are doing well regardless. I suspect we're going to see this story play out a lot, where the limitations of AI should be a major limiting factor, but people will get results anyway.

I imagine it will rely a lot on the pilot, and how well they understand those limitations. Perhaps the bigger risks are those without good understanding of LLMs who just treat it like an all knowing expert human.

If you are only capable of blind trust or distrust then there’s a huge difference between human experts and LLMs (and it’s of course wise to put your blind trust in a human, not an LLM). But if you have more of a ”trust no one” or ”trust but verify” mentality in general then it’s not so clear cut. The LLMs have their advantages. For example every chat with an LLM is an independent sample, whereas once a doctor has diagnosed you it’s very hard to get them to consider evidence contradictory to that diagnosis.

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