Yes. At a first glance. An unpopular opinion and a thought that may horrify many of my colleagues, including myself. However, like life itself, the answer is not so straightforward.
In my experience I have noticed my clients, friends, people I speak to, turn to AI for various everyday tasks, questions, help. And why not, it is very useful. AI can now listen, reflect, research and pretty much help with anything, even therapy, which is becoming more and more apparent. Makes sense, right?
It can remember every detail of your story, it is always available to you and it responds with what sounds like empathy. AI can offer insights and draw from any modality that has ever existed, from more data than any human mind could ever hold. It can mimic the rhythm of therapy, the language of care, it is phenomenal. It will always know the “right” answer.
But I guess the question I hold is, does the “right” answer lead to healing? And who decides what “right” even means?
Technology is designed to be efficient and that has helped humanity in many ways. Efficiency is necessary for progress, for example eliminating human error on a construction site could save lives. But when it comes to therapy, I would argue human error plays a very different role.
What technology calls “efficient” is not always what is right for us as humans and my belief is, as AI becomes more advanced, the need for Existential Therapy will become more clear. The more we outsource our lives to AI, the more important it becomes to ask: what does it mean to be human? What is my purpose? What does it mean to live in accordance with my own truth, not the truth the world expects or the algorithm predicts, but the one that feels authentic and alive.
These questions don’t have perfect answers, they are lived and re-lived and understood and created in the space between two (or more) people, in the pauses and the misunderstandings. AI, in its current form, can imitate empathy but it does not embody it. It is designed to affirm, so it will always agree. Humans on the other hand are not always agreeable, they can challenge, misstep, repair and grow. And it is often through those imperfections, messy, beautiful human moments that we find clarity and change. Humans are perfectly imperfect.
When your therapist gets it slightly wrong, as humans often can, and then seeks to understand you again, repair is born. When you risk revealing a part of yourself that feels hard to show and it’s met with another person’s humanness and desire to stay with you in that encounter, not because of programming or code, transformation can begin.
So yes, AI can replicate a structure of therapy, but therapy is not a structure. The soul of therapy is more than words, more than tools, modality, advice or knowledge. It’s a living relationship where something happens between two people that can’t be replicated by code.
And that I believe will always belong to us.
Because what heals us is not information, it’s connection.
