The immediacy of AI chatbots makes them an attractive alternative to human-to-human therapy that is expensive and often inconvenient. But while they may offer sensible advice, they aren't infallible.
Artificial intelligence used as a therapeutic tool dates back to the 1960s when a program called ELIZA, opens in a new window gave scripted responses to users who described their emotional states. While novel, it had no real understanding of the process it was involved in.
But AI has come a long way since then, with smartphone apps like Woebot, Wysa and Replika having sophisticated, two-way conversations with their users, offering emotional support, mood tracking, and therapeutic exercises like journaling or mindfulness.
And with the arrival of generative online AI assistants such as ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini, mental health advice delivered by AI-driven systems looks surprisingly similar to strategies you’d expect to be given by real-world therapists. Each conversation is a unique interaction with an AI system that is much more context-aware and personalised – even able to remember past conversations. This allows users to explore personal challenges, mental health issues and practical problems in a more nuanced way.
In the real world, therapy can be prohibitively expensive, difficult to attend for people living remotely, and inconvenient to a person’s schedule. Or worse, you might find yourself having to wait weeks or months before finding a vacancy in the therapist’s roster.
But a conversation with an AI system is, by contrast, immediate, cheap (if not free) and convenient.
Does this mean therapists can be replaced by AI? Even ChatGPT says the advice it offers is no substitute for a trained therapist’s, and often when providing a list of suggestions and strategies to cope with personal problems will include ‘consider talking to a mental health professional’.