One of the most interesting things you can be doing in the 21st century is pretending that an AI is your psychotherapist. You can write out instructions to an AI to do a "character analysis,"* you can specify its approach and its sources, and then you can feed it the real words or behaviors of people you actually know. It can produce outputs that seem like the machine recognizes some of the patterns in your own thinking. This is funny to me because it feels the beginning of like a narcissistic doom-loop. You can set up this talking machine to give you human-sounding feedback that almost inescapably reflects your own biases and interests. It's like you're talking directly to the habit-forming algorithm beneath Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or whatever. Like this is actually the final boss of hypermodern superstimulus: staying in endless psychotherapy with a complicated circuit that doesn't actually hear anything but just fucks with your social-emotional self-concept. * You can't actually say anything that reveals you're actually talking about real humans, though, because as soon as you say any trigger words the AIs will just give you heckin' wholesome wellness tips. I think that this is really revealing because it indicates that the AI people have a clue about the kind of liability they should properly face for these talking machines.
It's interesting but I reject the idea this is necessarily a doom-loop. Most people can recognise sycophants. And people who agree on virtually everything often argue the most violently... the narcissism of small differences, I guess.
Sounds like something that could take you to a really dark place. It won't have the tact to tell you what you shouldn't hear nor the ability to discern if what you're telling it is reasonable or not
>>779 Baudrillard talks about this. "People work on the computer as is to look at the function of their own minds." It's a form of distracted auto-reference, an *operational* narcissism. This is not a fatal strategy. He says it's part of how everyone is required to find a niche in a world of circuits. "To each person their own circuit, their own computer." It's not a Lacanian mirror stage, which has been shattered.
I think it depends on how you view the role of therapy. It could be a cybernetic control mechanism, whose purpose is to gather data about your psychic state, process it, and then generate the proper output that it feeds back into the system to prevent you from killing yourself & maybe helps you go to work etc... If that's the case, then getting caught in some supernormal feedback loop is problematic Obviously I don't see it that way. To me it's a place to process emotions and ideas that are bigger than yourself. The goal is not maintaining the functioning of a life, but deepening it. It's more like religion for atheists or philosophy for midwits. When I was more ill, I would always try and explain something to my therapist, and they would put me in some box, and then I would always go, "Yes, but..." and it must've been so tiring. From the cybernetic angle, you can view this as prompt engineering a supernormal stimulus, but I think instead it's a way of resisting easy answers and prefiguring a way to live authentically in your situation. Therapy is good because your therapist only speaks in trite slogans.