Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This week on iHeart Sensey, But.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
A lot of peeople are fact checking their therapists, saying, well,
I went to chat GPT and they gave me this advice,
and why didn't you tell me about that?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Do you trust an AI chat bought to give you advice?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Using AI to replace an essentially human interaction is dangerous.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
The growing trend of people using AI for therapy. Doctor
Molly Patchen is here from the Lindar Center of Hope
and later.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
If we can get more young people to be mentored
and understand that there are careers for them here in
this city, then we will do better in our own pipeline.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Cincinnati business and public schools working together to keep kids
in school, give them hope, and helping them find their
path forward after high school from the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative
actually du boise my guest in the second half of
the show.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Now on iHeart Sensey with Sandy Collins, have.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
You ever asked Alexa plus, Chat, GPT or rock for advice?
More and more every day we're hearing stories from people
who use AI to battle loneliness and depression and other
mental health concerns to help them with mankind quote hurtling
toward our cyborgian future. Doctor Nancy Patchin from the Lender
Center of Hope in Cincinnati brings her expertise in clinical psychology,
(01:26):
and we're at intersects with artificial intelligence, highly programmed learned
language models that will tell you what you want to
hear and why she's concerned. Nancy, Welcome to our public
affairs program. My heart Cincy.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Wealth of knowledge. So you're a clinical psychologist, you're interested
in artificial intelligence in the realm of therapy and psychology.
We're finding more and more people are using AI to
help them with their mental health. And you are exploring
in your substack and in some of your other postings
(02:04):
what the issues are, Why is that a bad idea
or a good idea? And you give some really good
advice I think to other psychologists of how to approach this.
So that's what I want to talk with you today about,
is the tendency for people to now be going to
the chat GPT, to the GROCK, to the Alexa plus
and asking for therapeutic advice and what you think about that.
(02:29):
So can you kind of start there, explain how you
got interested in this developing technology and how you're approaching it.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Absolutely, Yeah. So I've been always interested in the edge
of technology in whatever I'm doing, and right now is
a really exciting time because AI, machine learning, and all
of these different artificial intelligence models are really taking off
and burgeoning, which is kind of have our society and
(03:01):
our world have the right combination of ingredients to make
this happen now. So it's pretty it's a pretty incredible
new technology and we're living in an exciting time. That said,
I think it's really important that we as a society,
and especially people in my profession, become very aware of
(03:21):
what this technology can do for better and for worse.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
People are just naturally going to check or Alexa plus,
as I did yesterday. I got to tell you this story.
So I asked Alexa plus what the weather was going
to be today? And alexaplus is programmable in a way
that you can program the voice that you hear, and
you can program the kind of style that you want.
(03:47):
So I've used this every day for I don't know
how many, six eight months, what's the weather today? And yesterday,
out of nowhere, it said tone competent today forecast is
going to be da da da da da da da
tone and then said another word and it explained weather
warning and then it said tone warm, So Sandy, be
(04:10):
very careful about the snow and make sure you stay
warm out there. I said, Alexa, why did you just
say tone competent and tone warm? And it came back
very human. Oops, some of the background processes escaped, and
I'm really sorry about that, and we won't have that
happen again. That is crazy and a really good reminder
(04:35):
that this is not a human talking to you. This
is a computer.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So that's a really good question, and your experience with
Alexa plus, I think, is a good example of how
we tend to assign human qualities to these machines. So
we anthropomorphize machines, and we do this with everything. Humans
are designed to do this. We start doing this as children.
(05:03):
We assign human qualities and even aliveness to all sorts
of objects, like our pets or our cars, or children
do this with stuffed animals. So there's lots of ways
that we anthropomorphize, we make human all of these objects.
The key is something else you said. We know that
(05:24):
they're objects, so humans in psychodynamic psychoanalytic terms, we call
humans subjects. Subjects have a mind and their own lived experience.
Objects don't. That's a really important distinction when we get
into clinical psychology because if we have people who are
(05:47):
relating to an object as if it was a subject,
that can be problematic in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
And that's the problem is a lot of people are
thinking that the Chat, GPT or the GROC or the
AI is it's actually so customized that it's actually alive
in some way and it knows me. And that can
be a real problem because, as we've all been told,
AI can be wrong and it's only going to give you.
According to what you were saying in your sub stack,
(06:15):
I was reading, it's going to give you what you
want to hear and not necessarily what will help you.
You wrote this piece about the kind of the amalgamation
of all of your patients that are turning to Chat,
GPT or GROC or alexiplus for advice, and they're kind
of double checking you basically, And when you think about this,
(06:37):
because my GROC says this and my daughter's doing the
exact same thing. So can you go ahead and discuss
that recent piece it's called the Examined algorithm when wanting
becomes outsourced. And this is just really beautifully explained for
people that don't understand psychology without a degree, you know
(06:57):
what I mean?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Oh the things? Well, I'm glad you liked it. That's
really my goal. My intention in twenty twenty six was
to start sharing more of my writing. So that's why
I started this sub stack just about a month ago.
And the examined algorithm is really a big theme that
I want to explore. I'm a psychodynamic psychologist, so I
(07:21):
really appreciate the original ideas of Freud and the way
that they've been developed over the last one hundred and
twenty years. So a lot's happened. It's not just the
same stuff that Fred was talking about. So the examined
life somewhat of a mantra of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychologists
(07:43):
and practitioners, meaning we have to be aware of what
we are doing, how we are doing it, why we
are driven to do the things we're doing, And that
applies to AI in a really important and exciting way.
That these algorithms can have some levels of awareness, it's
(08:03):
different from human awareness, but they also don't have awareness
in the way that a living and breathing human subject
has So the case of Alan again is a combination.
It's not a real person, but a lot of PEO
people are fact checking their therapists saying, well, I went
to chat, GPT or Instagram or the meta AI questions
(08:28):
that you can ask that all have AI drivers behind them,
and they gave me this advice, and why didn't you
tell me about that? Or why didn't you catch this?
So some people are directly challenging their therapist. Some people
are using it more like an augmentation or like a
reminder of some of the concepts. But it's really becoming prevalent.
(08:50):
One study I just found in twenty twenty four and
twenty twenty five, it was a year long period of
all the adults that they surveyed who were using these
large language models like chatbots, forty eight percent we're using
it for mental health support. That's huge. That's a huge amount.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
So this is an.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Amazingly powerful general purpose technology. It has a lot of
great uses in mental health, and as mental health practitioners,
I really think we need to learn about this and
be aware of how to use it in a healthful
way so that it doesn't take our patients off into
an unhealthy line of thinking.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Your piece was talking about when Alan was challenging you
basically with your advice versus the AI advice, and how
that manifested in you, and how that made you feel
almost like you had to defend yourself in a way.
But then you had to figure out really what was
going on with him, and then eventually at the end
(09:55):
of the piece explaining how to get Alan where he
needed to be, and he was going in the wrong
direction because the chat was giving him the answers that
he wanted, which was to work harder, work harder. You
can do it all. You're a superman. And you were
trying to tell him you need to slow down and
it's okay, and he was pushing back against that, and
(10:17):
you had to figure out what is this man really wants?
And I just thought that was so insightful because you
admitted that, you know, gosh, when somebody questions me on
my professional advice and it's a computer, it's hard not
to feel defensive, and you addressed that and pushed through that,
and I thought that was really well done.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Thank you. Yeah, I think that's a major area that
people in a lot of professions need to work on.
You know, if somebody accuses you in your work of
doing something wrong and you know you haven't done it wrong,
you get defensive, right, It's a natural instinct. The good
thing about psychoanalytic and psycho dynamic psychology is that we're
(11:02):
trained to be aware of our patterns of defenses, to
be aware when those threads are getting pulled in sessions,
and to understand there's another way to respond. I don't
have to jump back in and say, wait a minute,
that's not what I met, because that wouldn't be helpful.
That would just be getting into a power dynamic with
(11:23):
whatever LLM he's using. And honestly, I'm going to lose
that artificial intelligence model. I respect that it has seen
so much more information than I'll ever be able to
digest in my lifetime, and yet that doesn't make it
better at everything. So I love that concept of the
(11:48):
examined algorithm, where a patient is actually bringing in Yeah,
I am looking at this for advice, and it actually
gave me better advice. I think another question to ask
is if a human had said those same things, would
you respond in the same way, So you can do
a gut check on yourself if you're using these things.
If if you're you said your daughter's using it, if
(12:11):
you told her the exact same advice, would she listen
to it in the same way.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
The fear is always that Chad is going to get
it wrong. We hear news stories about people who believe
that the AI is real, the AI leads them down
the wrong path. And your point in your piece was
(12:37):
that your job isn't to demonize this technology. It's to
understand how people are using it and making sure that
they are still clear that you know, getting information or
looking up things on AI is okay, but taking mental
health advice from a machine is not the best use
(12:58):
of your technology because your human therapist can do so
much more because you're human.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
That AI is really good for tasks. Humans are good
for relationships. So in one sense, people are terrified that
AI is going to take your job. AI is going
to replace people. To be honest, AI's got better things
to do. AI can do really well at tasks. Ethan
(13:32):
Moolic from Wharton's School writes a lot about this that
jobs are not just tasks. Jobs are bundles of tasks,
and it is helpful to have a human who is living,
breathing in a body in the world who can make
these judgment decisions of what tasks need to be done.
(13:53):
And then there are all kinds of ways that we
as people can get really good at using AI for
a tool. But I agree using AI to replace an
essentially human interaction is dangerous. Moderate use of AI can
actually be supportive in reducing loneliness in most people, but
(14:15):
heavy use of AI influenced forces can increase loneliness, and
it has a lot of other negative side effects. So
there's a lot of ways that I'm not demonizing AI,
and I think it's important that psychotherapists and mental health
practitioners in general understand what is this technology. My bottom
(14:37):
line is, if you're using AI to replace a human therapist,
then you are kind of kidding yourself. It's not a
great replacement. It can be a good tool for helping
yourself use skills, tips and tricks, but it's not a
replacement for a human therapist who can understand you and
overcome misunderstandings. And if people want to read more about
(14:59):
the I'm developing a framework for a therapist and I
think for general public audiences too. You can find me
on substack at ai psychologist, or you can search for
me under my name.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
I am fascinated by this and I'm glad to see
that you're on the forefront of figuring this out. Thank you,
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Nancy Patchen,
a clinical psychologist from the Linener Center of Hope. Coming up.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
It was the first time I'd ever met a woman engineer,
and I was like, this is awesome for you fifteen
and I was like, oh my god, this is amazing,
like women can be engineers. I had never seen it before.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
This is iHeart. Cincy