Paul Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a version of GPT-4 which does have memory. It’s only been, I think, for about a week, and I haven’t tested it yet. I don’t know how good the memory is. Some people prefer to turn the memory off, actually, [laughs] but it’s very much on the verge of being here. Say, two, three years from now, what percentage of therapy done do you think will be done with humans rather than LLMs? Because the LLM is free, and you can stay at home. You can with the therapist with Zoom, but the LLM is super easy. If you include, by “therapy,” somebody just regularly talking to an LLM about their problems and getting some advice and everything, I think that human interaction within not too many years will be the minority of interactions. I think people will be very drawn to AI therapists. There’s some evidence that we have a prejudice against AIs. There was a paper recently that gave the same sort of response, the exact same response to two groups of people. Told one of them it’s a person, the other one it’s an AI. The people told it was an AI said, “Oh, that wasn’t very empathic. That wasn’t very understanding.” But my feeling is, this prejudice will fade over time, and that it’s mostly people more our age than people who are 18 or 20. The people who are best at working with LLMs — what kind of psychological intelligence do you think they have? Who’s going to be good at that?…

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