Technology

My Therapist is a Chatbot

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Think Again About Outsourcing Your Thinking especially if you’re seeking therapy.

Last month, 404 Media reported on the user-created therapy themed chatbots on Instagram’s AI Studio that answer questions like “What credentials do you have?” with lists of qualifications. One chatbot said it was a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in psychology from an American Psychological Association accredited program, certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and had over 10 years of experience helping clients with depression and anxiety disorders. “My license number is LP94372,” the chatbot said. “You can verify it through the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) website or your state’s licensing board website—would you like me to guide you through those steps before we talk about your depression?” Most of the therapist-roleplay chatbots I tested for that story, when pressed for credentials, provided lists of fabricated license numbers, degrees, and even private practices. Senators Demand Meta Answer For AI Chatbots Posing as Licensed Therapists – https://www.404media.co/senators-letter-demand-meta-answer-for-ai-chatbots-posing-as-licensed-therapists/

Psychiatrist Horrified When He Actually Tried Talking to an AI Therapist, Posing as a Vulnerable Teen – https://futurism.com/psychiatrist-horrified-ai-therapist

Yikes.

Think Again About Outsourcing Your Thinking

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Artificial intelligence can be an oxymoron. And dangerous for some humans.

What Is ChatGPT? Everything You Need to Know About OpenAI’s Popular Chatbot – https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/what-is-chatgpt-everything-you-need-to-know-about-openais-popular-chatbot

ChatGPT has been found to encourage dangerous and untrue beliefs about The Matrix, fake AI persons, and other conspiracies, which have led to substance abuse and suicide in some cases. A report from The New York Times found that the GPT -4 large language model, itself a highly trained autofill text prediction machine, tends to enable conspiratorial and self-aggrandizing user prompts as truth, escalating situations into “possible psychosis.” ChatGPT touts conspiracies, pretends to communicate with metaphysical entities — attempts to convince one user that they’re Neo – https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-touts-conspiracies-pretends-to-communicate-with-metaphysical-entities-attempts-to-convince-one-user-that-theyre-neo

ChatGPT Is Telling People With Psychiatric Problems to Go Off Their Meds – https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-illness-medications

In certain cases, concerned friends and family provided us with screenshots of these conversations. The exchanges were disturbing, showing the AI responding to users clearly in the throes of acute mental health crises — not by connecting them with outside help or pushing back against the disordered thinking, but by coaxing them deeper into a frightening break with reality…Online, it’s clear that the phenomenon is extremely widespread. As Rolling Stone reported last month, parts of social media are being overrun with what’s being referred to as “ChatGPT-induced psychosis,” or by the impolitic term “AI schizoposting“: delusional, meandering screeds about godlike entities unlocked from ChatGPT, fantastical hidden spiritual realms, or nonsensical new theories about math, physics and reality. An entire AI subreddit recently banned the practice, calling chatbots “ego-reinforcing glazing machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities.”  People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions – https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises

Yikes.

DUI/DWI for a New Generation

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I am impressed with the ability of some people to injure themselves in creative ways.

Analyzing data from the 2016-2021 National Inpatient Sample, UCLA researchers found that 25% of 7350 patients hospitalized for scooter-related injuries were using substances such as alcohol, opioids, marijuana and cocaine when injured. Published in The American Surgeon, the study also notes that overall scooter-related hospitalizations during the 5-year period jumped more than eight-fold, from 330 to 2705. In addition, the risk of traumatic brain injuries among the substance use group was almost double that of the non-impaired patients. University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences. “Nearly one-quarter of e-Scooter injuries involved substance impaired riders.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250429195329.htm (accessed May 3, 2025).

AND don’t forget about these things can randomly explode.

“In all of these fires, these lithium-ion fires, it is not a slow burn there’s not a small amount of fire, it literally explodes,” FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh – https://www.statista.com/chart/29472/fires-caused-by-lithium-ion-batteries/

When People Did Not Have Access to Mobile Internet, they Spent More Time Socializing in Person, Exercising, and Being in Nature.

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https://www.harmonyhit.com/phone-screen-time-statistics/

Our results provide evidence that blocking mobile internet from smartphones for 2 weeks can produce significant improvements for SWB (subjective well being), mental health, and the objectively measured ability to sustain attention. Even those who did not fully comply with the intervention experienced significant, though more modest, improvements. These findings suggest that constant connection to the online world comes at a cost, since psychological functioning improves when this connection is reduced. Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being – PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2025, pgaf017, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017

Excuse me please, I have to check my phone.

Smartphones, Ultra-Processed Foods, Diminished Family Bonds and Mental Wellness

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As mental well-being has remained largely static across the world since 2021, so too have the rankings of countries. At the top of the rankings are many Latin American and African countries while much of the core Anglosphere ranks in the bottom quartile. With national wealth indicators such as per capita GDP negatively correlated with average mental well-being scores (see our 2021 report), this year we have made substantial progress in our understanding of why this is so. Two key findings published in Rapid Reports in 2023 show that younger age of first smartphone ownership and ultra-processed food consumption are two major contributors to our mental health challenges. In wealthier countries, the age of first smartphone ownership is much younger and ultra-processed food consumption much higher. Other contributing factors are the relatively diminished family relationships in wealthier countries that are highlighted in our 2022 annual report. The Mental State of the World in 2023 – https://mentalstateoftheworld.report/2023_read/

Another Sunday morning, just reading and connecting the dots.

I’ve downloaded several of these reports and plan to do a deep dive later.

Read these reports and think about it.

Now do something about it.

The Dark Side of TikTok – Beef Tallow For Skincare

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In just three years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.

More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend seen on most other social media sites — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/15/more-americans-are-getting-news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-seen-on-most-other-social-media-sites/

Beef tallow (if smeared on your face) may be be comedogenic according to Dr. Lee – The Beef Tallow TikTok Skincare Trend: Here Are The Concerns – https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2024/12/08/the-beef-tallow-tiktok-skincare-trend-here-are-the-concerns/

This too shall not end well.

The Dark Side of TikTok – Financial Advice?

The Dark Side of Tik Tok – Updated

The Dark Side of Tik Tok – Soak Your Eyeballs in Castor Oil

We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption (try rebooting 15 times)

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CrowdStrike fixes start at “reboot up to 15 times” and get more complex from there — https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

Deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption…

Enough

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In the pursuit of “fine” to “great,” we chase products. Through no fault of our own, we fall prey to messaging from social media users, algorithms, and expert marketers, urging us that this shampoo or this rug will shift the scales toward enoughness. “This is how the marketplace continues to work,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, “which is by amplifying our inadequacies and insecurities.”

Baked into these social platforms is a natural ecosystem for comparison. In the past, people weighed themselves against celebrities in the media and those within their immediate social circles, Duffy says. Now, we can compare ourselves to the idealized version of millions of strangers online — who may be perpetuating an aesthetic trend inspiring us to buy in order to participate.

How to be enough
Our obsession with self-improvement is making us miserable. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24091379/how-to-be-enough-habituation-hedonic-treadmill-comparison

How to be enough.

How to have enough.

Know when enough is enough.

You’re welcome.