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Sam Altman says your ChatGPT therapy session might not stay private in a lawsuit
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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If I go to someone and ask for a therapy session, even if they are the most supportive, thoughtful person I could hope to find, it's not appropriate for them to hold it out as proper therapy. We have rules and restrictions on who is allowed to offer certain services, and for good reason. If one asks their therapist about confidentiality, it's highly inappropriate for the therapist to misrepresent the confidentiality rules, also for good reason.
ChatGPT will gladly claim to be able to provide this support, and will promise complete anonymity. It will say that it's able to offer good advice and guidance. As you said, the text it generates will certainly be natural-sounding. It also won't be therapy. It definitely won't be anonymous.
A person who lies about stuff faces consequences. A label on the door of a "medicinalist" that says "No promises to offer truthful information, verify all important things" isn't going to prevent that if they're selling arsenic as a cure-all. If a company wants to offer a service, they should be restricted in what they can claim they are offering.
This isn’t a failure of the model - it’s a misunderstanding of what the model is. ChatGPT is a tool, not a licensed practitioner. It has one capability: generating language. That sometimes produces correct information as a side effect of the data it was trained on, but there is no understanding, no professional qualification, and no judgment behind it.
If you ask it whether it’s qualified to act as a therapist, it will tell you no. If you instruct it to role-play as one, it will however do that - because following instructions is the thing it’s designed to do. Complaining that a language model behaves like a language model, and then demanding more guardrails to stop people from using it badly, is just outsourcing common sense.
There’s also this odd fixation on Sam Altman as if he’s hand-crafting the bot’s behavior in real time. It’s much closer to an open-ended, organic system that reacts to input than a curated service. What you get out of it depends entirely on what you put in.