This is Part 2 of my series on AI. Check out Part 1 HERE.
If you’re using AI to help yourself between therapy sessions, here are 3 recommendations I have for you…PLUS a prompt you should totally steal today.
1. Keep an eye on your privacy.
Oversharing with a chatbot is a significant privacy risk, but we’ll come back to that. But privacy comes back to the basics. Build a habit of running through this mental checklist before you open chatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever program you’re into:
- Where Am I?
- Who’s around?
- Who can hear me speaking or hear my playback (what audio devices am I connected to)?
- Who knows my phone login or account passwords?
And of course, you’ll want to know how the program you’re using handles data? Does it use it for training? Does it keep your conversations forever?
2. Know yourself: What is your tendency for over-sharing?
Online Disinhibition means that the more time you spend online, the more likely you are to break rules and norms you would normally follow in person.
This is how we get online trolls. They would NEVER say certain things to another person in real life, but they feel freer and more courageous behind a keyboard.
Well, my friend, you’re probably nicer than the trolls, but you’re still just as human as they are and your human brain can start to let loose with too much interaction with a bot.
Maybe you didn’t intend to overshare, or use certain names, or include confidential work data when you were talking to the chatbot, but oops, it came out! This can lead to creepy responses, disciplinary action, or unusual information popping up in the answers to other questions.
You’ll need to edit yourself before you speak/type your questions, and after you gather responses, to ensure that something personal doesn’t pop up when you’re least expecting it.
3. Use chat names or titles to remind you that you’re “talking to” an object, not a person.
If you treat objects as if they’re humans, that’s called anthropomorphizing. Need an example? Let’s pretend for a second, take our friend Snuffles here:
If I asked you to reach into the screen, take this sweet stuffed animal, put it in a box, close the lid, tape it shut and hide it in the coldest, darkest part of your home, could you do it?
Now, if you don’t know why I’d ask you that, maybe anthropomorphizing isn’t a big issue for you.
But if you found yourself getting tense, barely breathing, thinking about how Mister Snuffles will breathe and whether he’ll be lonely?…Well then, you may struggle with keeping humans and objects in their separate categories.
No judgment here, but you need to know yourself because chat-based AI is designed to blur the line between program and person as much as possible!
There are early reports of some people getting enamored with their custom GPT, falling in love, having sexual attraction, and even ruining in-person relationships. The research is still early on this, but I suspect a significant issue is that human relationships are just really complicated. Humans can abandon you, they argue, smell, fight, need things, and of course, love you! But chatbots seem simple: they tell you what you want to hear because that’s how they’re programmed.
My best advice here is to train yourself to treat your chosen AI platform like a notebook, workbook, or sketchbook, but not like a person. If you have custom GPTs (or Gems, etc.) change the titles or names to remind you that they are resources/objects, not people. You can pick titles like:
- Therapy Follow-Up Notebook
- Personal Thoughts — Analyzed by Chat GPT
- A big list of things I’m thinking about.
- Takeaways from Therapy
- I learned this about myself today.
- What I’m working on now – share with [name of actual human mentor or friend]
- My Digital Mood Workbook
…Do you see how these titles that remind you that YOU’RE the human who created this thing, and the chatbot is an object holding and analyzing the thing for you?
**Bonus tip, if you’re really struggling with turning objects into humans by mistake, you can ALSO prompt the GPT to remind you after each response that AI is not therapy and that you are not speaking with a human.
Conclusion
The same philosophies that turned social media into both a blessing and a curse are at work here and we need to proceed with care. But if you’re using these tools already, I’m happy to work with you to help you safely get the most out of them! Reach out when you’re ready (I have new hours, including availability on most Saturdays!).
OH! And HERE’s the link to your Bonus Prompt!
-ACM, LMFT