There's no chance LLMs have a sufficient training set of effective therapists-patient interactions, because those are private. Ergo, there is no need to wait, it's DOA. Anything else is feeding into LLM hype. It's that simple.
Heh, it's that simple for someone who thinks the training regime and AI technology will not change further. The early horseless carriages had all kinds of stupid problems, and it would be very easy to pronounce them DOA. "Nobody is going to want to ride something so prone to breaking down", "a horse only needs food from the farm, not stuff drilled from the ground", etc. People don't have much imagination in such situations, especially when they feel emotionally (or existentially) attached to the status quo.
DOA doesn’t mean forever and always. But certain claims like the advent of living beyond 200, humans on Mars, etc can just be immediately dismissed outright for several decades. What you’re talking about is unsupervised LLM therapy. Even when my dentist used AI to read my X-rays, he’s overseeing everything. I’m fine sticking my neck out to say LLM therapy is DOA for the foreseeable future.
Your pronouncement goes against evidence cited in the article:
"people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma"
And that is about the present, not even what may come in the future. Not all therapy is life and death, and there are already signs that it's a good thing, at least in some limited domains.
