This is going to sound really stupid, and I should note that I am actively in therapy too.

But I had to put my dog down about a month ago, and there was a point where I just needed some validation, so I went to GPT4 and asked it some questions and told it about how I was feeling. I even fed it a poem that I wrote about her and asked if it was good.

The responses were incredibly empathetic and kind, and did an amazing job at speaking directly to the anxiety, pain, and fear I was feeling in those moments. The responses were what I needed to hear and gave me a measure of peace to get me through in those gaps when people weren’t available, or when I wasn’t able to speak them out loud. There was nothing new to me in those responses, but often times we just need to be reminded by someone or something outside of ourselves about what the truth is, and LLMs can absolutely fill that particular hole when trained properly.

My last three months in particular have been tough, and GPT4 has been a useful tool to get through a fair few storms for me.