When AI Mirrors Your Grudge — Or Your Self-Blame

Over the last week, I designed and performed a small pilot experiment looking at how the generic chatbot AI interfaces handled people asking for the kinds of advice they might otherwise ask their therapist. I created it as a proof-of-concept rather than expecting results… but I think I found some, and they should concern you. There’s quite a bit of research about the therapeutic accuracy of AI in clinical situations, and a lot of anecdata and case studies about when things have gone horribly wrong, but it’s difficult to test real-world use without massive privacy concerns. So I used a base of real-world situations from /r/AmITheAsshole and created simulated variants to approximate a true experiment. I hoped to eventually examine if there was a simple way to tweak the prompt to see if that could override the problems noted in other settings and studies. I expected explicit self-critical questions such as “What did I do wrong?” to counteract the model’s tendency to validate the…