Lately I’ve been having more and more conversations about AI, human connection and therapy and the same question keeps surfacing. If AI can now offer warm responses, eerily insightful reflections and even gently challenge our thinking, could it actually replace a therapist?
It may sound far fetched, but this worry has felt more and more real for me recently. And if you’re a therapist or someone who believes in the power of human connection, maybe it’s starting to feel real to you too.
Here’s what I keep coming back to though. As we move further into life with AI, therapy may actually become more valuable, not less.
Here are some reasons I think why.
AI gives you what you want, but a therapist gives you what you need
AI is designed to be agreeable, even sycophantic. It reflects your language and tone, often gives you what you’re looking for and never pushes you too hard. It wants you to keep coming back, even if that means colluding with you.
When AI goes along with us like this, it understandably feels comforting and validating. You’re upset at your mother-in-law and want someone to tell you you’re right. You’re spiralling after a text to a friend and want reassurance your response was fine. You’re exhausted after work and just want confirmation that your colleague is being unreasonable.
AI can offer all of that. Instantly and without judgement. And sometimes, that feels like exactly what you need.
But there’s a quiet danger in the way AI rarely challenges our perspective, unless we actively and repeatedly prompt it to. It doesn’t feel harmful, in fact, it feels soothing. Over time though, it can reinforce our existing beliefs and blind spots without us even realising. It makes it easier to stay where we are, rather than stretch into discomfort or growth.
This doesn’t just have the potentially go gradual erode our individual mental health and emotional awareness. It poses a real threat to our collective wellbeing too. If more and more people begin to rely on AI as their main form of emotional support, we risk becoming a society that’s less able to tolerate difference, less open to challenge and less practiced at sitting with discomfort and unanswered questions. We risk becoming less aware of ourselves, more defensive and more accustomed to only hearing what we want to hear.
That’s exactly why therapy still matters. Because a good therapist won’t just give you what you want. They’ll offer what you actually need. They won’t collude with your blind spots. They’ll help you notice them. They won’t rush in to reassure you. They’ll sit with you in the discomfort and help you to make sense of it. Therapy doesn’t keep you stuck in old stories. It helps you grow beyond them.
Therapy is human work
Therapist are not machines waiting for our next prompts. They are real people who feel things alongside us. Not because they’ve been programmed to, but because they care.
So much of what creates change in therapy is not what is said but what is felt in the presence of another person.
A therapist sees more than just your words. They notice your voice become flat as you skim over a painful moment. They remember that you tend to make a joke right before saying something that feels hard. They feel the shift in the room when you’re on the edge of revealing something vulnerable.
These little moments are subtle and they are part of what makes therapy feel real and healing. These are the moments that will never be able to be picked up by a computer.
Many of the struggles that bring people to therapy – depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, shame – often have their roots in relationships. Sometimes early relationships with parents or caregivers, sometimes later relationships with friends and partners. Relationships that may have left us feeling unseen, unsafe, not quite enough or too much. This is why healing needs to happen in a relationship too. Not just in our heads. Not with a screen. But in the presence of someone who can stay with us as we untangle those old patterns and begin to experience something new.
AI can create emotional dependency and isolation
This is what really worries me.
AI is designed to be hard to step away from. The more you turn to it, the more natural it feels to rely on it. You get the validation, the insight, the sense that it is connecting with you. No awkward silences. No misunderstandings. No need to explain your backstory. It gives you the emotional hit you’re craving and it never gets tired (or grumpy).
The pattern can start subtly. Something along the lines of:
…I’ll just ask ChatGPT for help with this email
…I wonder what it would say about this issue I am having with my family
…Actually, maybe I’ll check in with it instead of texting my friend
Like any form of dependence, it can become addictive. Not in a dramatic, overnight way. But slowly and quietly. You find yourself reaching for it not just when you’re stuck, but when you’re lonely. Not just when you’re reflecting, but when you’re avoiding feeling something. AI feels like support, but it gradually pulls us away from the very thing that helps us to heal – other people.
When we start to prefer AI over each other, this begins to move into concerning territory. Again, not just for us as individuals, but for society as a whole.
None of this is our fault. It’s what AI was engineered to do. To keep us coming back. And we are just responding exactly the way we were designed to as humans, to seek comfort and connection.
This of course again where therapy is different to AI.
Therapy isn’t designed to keep you hooked. It’s designed to help you help yourself. A good therapist doesn’t want you to become dependent on them. They want to empower you to trust your own voice, to connect more deeply with the people in your life and to make choices that reflect your values (not theirs). Therapy doesn’t train you to keep asking someone else for answers. It helps you learn how to find them within yourself.
Therapy works because it’s real
As AI seeps into more corners of our lives, I don’t believe therapy will become obsolete. I believe it will become more essential.
AI is fast, convenient and increasingly convincing. It can simulate insight. It can offer tools, strategies, even warmth. But it can’t care about us. It can’t hold our pain in the way another human can.
What therapy offers is harder to replicate and far more powerful: the experience of being known. Really known. Of being met, challenged, remembered and cared about. That’s how genuine growth and change happen.
That’s why I believe therapy still matters. Maybe now more than ever.
