Dear Fellow Traveller is a regular series of questions and reflections about the very human things we struggle with, wonder and carry with us.
So often, the best things in life start with a great question. Each piece begins there: with a question submitted by a reader or created from themes in our work with clients.
This not a question and answer series. We will rarely have neat and tidy answers. A good question offers us a more valuable opportunity: a chance to pause, reflect, and become open to previously unconsidered possibilities.
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THE QUESTION
I don’t have many close friends and I rarely see my family. Recently, when I’ve been lonely, I have been talking with ChatGPT and have asked it to give me therapy sessions. It often makes me feel better – is there anything wrong with using AI as my therapist?
Dear Fellow Traveller,
The first problem of writing about artificial intelligence is that the technology is developing far more quickly than we are able to think properly about it. By the time I’ve uploaded this, AI will have acquired a new talent or ability and my once-confident conclusions are turned into a historical embarrassment.
So I will talk about this only as things stand today. And, like so many things, my response is nuanced.
No, I don’t think there is nothing wrong or shameful about talking to ChatGPT, or something like it, and feeling better when you do. Your experience is real and I can understand why someone who is feeling lonely and isolated may want to return to something that appears to listen, remember and respond.
I would hesitate, though, to call it therapy or ask it to take the place of a therapist.
There are many reasons for my concern, but today I want to stay with one.
AI can reproduce the parts of therapy that are the easiest to observe: asking reflective, open questions, looking for patterns, drawing on therapeutic models to respond in a warm, interested way. These things are important, but I am not sure that they are what makes therapy most healing, useful or beautiful.
That part is much harder to explain. It exists in a wordless way, and each attempt to describe it always falls short. It might be described as relational depth, or I-Thou, or something like that. Today, I’ll call it something like resonance. In good therapy, the therapist is not simply drawing on their knowledge and training and selecting appropriate responses; they are allowing themselves to be moved by their client and to be affected by what happens between them. Something can happen in that space, a felt sense, a resonance of understanding between two human beings. This is the part I don’t think AI can participate in, right now. You may well experience something real while chatting with AI; it’s response may move or comfort you, but the movement is only way. There is no good reason to believe, right now, that AI is affected in any way by you.
This not an anti-AI response. I use AI myself frequently and enthusiastically. It helps me research, organise ideas and has been enormously helpful with learning how to build my website. I’m fascinated by the tool and how we will integrate this into our lives. I have also tried out the voice-chat feature on ChatGPT and found the conversations surprisingly – and unnervingly – interesting and fun. My experience hasn’t been entirely positive, though. I have let it have its wicked way with my writing. I’d put something in to ChatGPT, and it would spit something back at me that was sort of what I initially wrote, but without any teeth or spark. It was smoothed to the point of no friction at all and flopped like a wet fish on my screen. It found a way of saying what I wanted to say, but making it so accurate and polished that it was boring and impossible to remember even if you wanted to.
It found a more efficient way of saying what I wanted to say while simultaneously destroying anything that made it mine. I wonder whether a similar thing is happening when we talk about AI therapy. The recognisable parts remain; they may even be smoothed out and improved. But the thing under it – the bit that’s harder to name – has disappeared.
The appeal is obvious; it’s there whenever you need it, it does not get tired or bored or interrupt you, it doesn’t make demands of you. It doesn’t charge you, seem to hold anything against you or judge you and it has access to immense amounts of writing and research.
In contrast, human beings can be a right pain in the arse.
They each have their own needs and opinions, limits, bad moods. They are limited in their knowledge to what they have individually learned, make mistakes regularly and are not able to always deliver what we want to us with a smile. A machine that provides the appearance of full attention without the burden of reciprocity is very attractive. You are not a fool for being tempted by this. On paper, it is brilliant.
When I first began training as a therapist, a doctor friend told me over dinner that very soon technology would replace both of us. I could imagine it replacing much of his work; computers are very good at examining information, finding patterns and following rules to conclusions. But I felt that therapy was different – surely people would always prefer another human being if they wanted to talk of love, grief, sex, shame, death and all the other things we inevitably experience in a life time?
I now think I underestimated people’s readiness for this – maybe I didn’t think that people would willingly swap the difficulty of a human relationship for the convenience of an instant response.
I still believe that my instinct that there is just something ‘off’ about the idea of AI therapy is solid, but with my experience I can now put words to it, and it is the problem of resonance.
You see, therapy is not just a transaction between two people, one of which gives a list of problems and the other supplies the correct sequence of solutions, soft sympathetic sounds and prescriptions. If it was, there’s no reason that AI couldn’t do that for us and probably even better.
AI definitely has advantages over human therapists. It’s read more literature than I could ever do, it can provide any definition or explanation in the drop of a hat, and knows well the mental health vocabulary to common to therapy and our modern world; triggers, trauma, validation, narcissism.
It’s not about whether AI can sound like a therapist – it definitely can. But believing that this is enough means believing that this is all there is to therapy, and I think that’s missing one of it’s most important parts.
Back when I was in training, fellow trainees would ask questions like “What do you say when somebody tells you they are self-harming?” or “What should you say to someone who has an eating disorder?”. These are understandable questions, I guess coming form a place of fear, but I found them absurd then and even more so now. There is no phrase that magically unlocks the eating disorder, or a collection of words that put together in the right order will stop self harm.
A human being is not a faulty appliance and therapy is not the search for the best procedure to fix it.
A good therapist is more than just knowledgeable. They are present.
Presence is another word in our modern world that has been overused, like our friends trauma, or anxiety and risks losing it’s importance and meaning. But here I mean something quite literal by it: another human being is present, is actually there with you. A human with a body, a history, worries, blind spots and a life that will one day come to an end. They have no idea what you are about to say and how it might effect them. You are not simply delivering information to your therapist, you are actually reaching them.
Something real takes place when both the therapist and client can be affected by what is happening, and can share in it. A resonance can happen, because of a shared humanity.
AI can produce an elegant description of grief, here it is, I just asked ChatGPT for it and it said:
| “Grief is love with nowhere obvious to go: a presence shaped by absence, moving through us in waves, sometimes quietly, sometimes with the force to rearrange the whole inner landscape.” |
To be fair, pretty good. I especially like the love with nowhere to go bit. AI can talk about grief, but it has never grieved. It doesn’t know what it’s like to grief. It doesn’t know what it’s like to risk loving somebody, opening your heart to them, knowing full well that at some point one will lose the other. It can define shame beautifully, but it does not know what it is like to desire the ground to open and swallow you whole for something you said, did or just because you are who you are.
There is no good reason to believe that AI has experienced anything that it can talk about so beautifully.
And you might say – well, what does that matter? If the responses are helping, who cares if AI can resonate with what it is saying and truly knows what it means? Maybe it doesn’t in some cases, but when we start to think of the interaction as an actual relationship and especially if we start to call it therapy it really matters.
It matters in a similar way to hearing the words “I love you”. Hearing those three words in isolation, black and white, doesn’t do much for a human. We have to believe that the person saying it knows what love is, feels it for us and is choosing to share it with us. Then, we may be able to let it move us. If our car started saying ‘I love you’ every time we started up, it wouldn’t do much for us. If a person clearly shows us over and over again that they don’t love us, those same three words will probably produce anger, or incredulity or hurt.
It matters where words come from, not just what they are. In therapy, the words from your therapist are emerging from another life. Somebody who has known loss, pain, fear, challenges, who will also grow old and die someday just like you, someone who can be taken by surprise, misunderstand you and be changed in ways by knowing you.
I didn’t want to talk too much about this without testing it for myself, so I asked ChatGPT to give me a therapy session. It offered a customary disclaimer saying that it was not a therapist and then proceeded with no resistance at all to imitate one.
It asked my interesting, albeit disembodied and intellectual, questions. It responded compassionately, and seemed to take safety seriously. The reality is, it gave a very good impression of a therapist. I recognised a lot of the mechanics of therapy and could see when it was drawing on different theoretical approaches to respond to me. But, no matter what it said, I did not experience a felt sense of resonance for having shared myself with another human being and having been accepted.
The fact that the impression is so good is what makes the distinction important.
I’m not suggesting you stop using AI altogether, if it is helping you. If it helps you feel less lonely, great. Soon enough, we will be able to chat with it on video calls too. I’m sure that will help more. But I would be cautious about calling it therapy, or accepting a simulation of a therapist in place of a real one.
Therapy, as I understand and practice it, is far more than having the right words or analysis. It is a meeting between two or more human individuals, with differences, allowing themselves to be affected by the other, and sharing in how that is, noticing what’s happening between them and learning from it.
AI can describe that kind of thing perfectly. For now, I am not convinced it can actually join us in it.
Best of luck,
Fellow Traveller
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