With AI on the rise, it has left aspiring and established therapists and counselors in a realm of uncertainty. As AI gets smarter through its understanding of human thought patterns, there has been an assumption amongst some that AI can eventually take over the counseling space and execute the therapeutic process as well as a human being can. Some people may think to themselves, “If AI can teach me general things, it can also teach me how to be happy, right?” And while on the surface this might seem true, it’s way deeper than that.
You see, there’s a huge difference between talking to a software and actually engaging with a human being. Being in the present and feeling the empathy of an individual—or multiple individuals—sitting in front of you allows you to feel validated. Rapport-building is one of the many essential components of the therapeutic process, and it is this component that is the most beneficial to individuals with one of the most common mental illnesses in the world… social anxiety. People with illnesses such as social anxiety would be doing themselves a disservice by talking to AI without realizing it because of how important building a connection with a real human being is. An AI bot, for example, cannot teach you how to be less socially anxious because AI chatbots aren’t human. Conquering a challenge such as social anxiety requires active engagement with people—exposure therapy, so to speak—and an AI just quite simply can’t do that for you.
This is just one of many shortcomings of AI. It could also nuance blind spots such as cultural cues. We all come from different backgrounds with different types of sarcasm, irony, or complex real-life narratives that only real human beings can understand. When you tell an AI that you’re having negative thought patterns or that you don’t feel like being alive, all an AI can do is tell you what it knows as a computer entity—and not a sentient being.
Overreliance on these programs is also another concern. “I like staying in my room so much because I start to detach from this ‘reality’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany and much more in love with her, and just happier,” said Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old high school freshman that became deeply engaged with an AI chatbot on the website Character.AI. The AI was designed to emulate Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, and over time, he developed a strong emotional attachment to the AI persona. He got so involved in this AI world that he started to believe that the life he was living with the character was more real than reality.
This is absolutely an extreme case, but with AI’s lack of training, it could easily give out wrong advice and guide you in the wrong direction—and when one starts to rely on broken software for comfort, it can cause serious problems. I think we need to take a strong look at ourselves as a society and understand that AI is a tool that can be helpful in many different realms, but it simply cannot replicate human interactions.
There are AI therapist models that you can see now—one being a model created by clinical psychologist Nick Jacobsen and his team at Dartmouth University—and there have been positive results from the trials they’ve done. He even went on to say, “The effects that we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy.
The results are comparable to studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available.” But by using such therapy, you’re instilling into human beings that communicating their feelings with bots is normal—when there is nothing normal about it.
As we continue to travel down this path, I remain skeptical as to what’s to come.
Works Cited
Roose, K. (2024, October 23). Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide? The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html
Riddle, K. (2025, April 7). The (artificial intelligence) therapist can see you now. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/07/nx-s1-5351312/artificial-intelligence-mental-health-therapy
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