Say 'hi' to your new AI therapist

In the depths of the pandemic, when in-person health care was reserved for emergencies, I began seeing a therapist online. It felt strange to me then, the idea of confiding in someone I’d only met through a screen—but teletherapy now feels routine to me, as it likely does to the millions of people who use it regularly.

And yet, data suggest many Americans still have reservations about certain aspects of tech-assisted mental-health care—maybe not so much video-chat sessions, but certainly the widening pool of apps and chatbots that use artificial intelligence. In one recent survey, about 80% of U.S. adults said they definitely did not want to mix AI and mental-health care.

It’s hard to say exactly why. But one possible reason, experts told me, is that there's an inherently human quality to therapy that it’s difficult to imagine an algorithm ever duplicating. “Maybe psychotherapy is not really about a particular technique,” one researcher said. “Maybe it’s about co-creating a context in which someone might be growing as a person, exploring themselves, maybe facing existential fears, having someone with whom they can speak about [difficult topics].”

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