A subtler aspect of this is the potential for cheap, tailored counselling. A few iterations and it will no doubt be possible to enhance the mental well-being of those without prior access, for comparatively little cost.
Those benefits again extend into every area, crime and poverty being rooted both in lack of education and lack of social and emotional support.
The social acceptance of chatting with an AI is important in this as it gets people over that mental hurdle. Localising chats so they are not subject to privacy concerns also advances benefits such as these.
There's positive benefits to be found everywhere with AI, but they won't be if we don't envisage, look for, and develop them. And they need to be found for balance, as it remains true there are many potential negatives.
This utopia you envision where we use AI for anything remotely good sure would be nice, but with the way the world and the people pushing for this AI especially work there just isn't a chance in hell that's how it's gonna end up going.
Any single not-for-profit social health organisation, of which there are a huge number, could use a tiny part of their funding to fine-tune an LLM on counselling resources and case transcripts. It'd cost little, and only need to be done once.
The major hurdle here, again, is education. Once such organisations realise how much more easily they can reach their goals using AI, they'll jump on it. The final obstacle is then social acceptance of AI assistance (growing now).
But the "extremely positive applications" to ChatGPT are, at the very least, the same positive applications of any other search engine.