into the woods—AI is not therapy
13 November 2024- Late 2024
- Global Atmospheric CO2: 423 ppm
“I don’t think I can do it,” you say, peering into the dark shadows of the thick wood. You are lucky to have a companion to guide you under the leaves. You know that; it takes the edge off. But still, you are afraid.
Sometimes you almost forget your companion. As you step off the main road and under the darkling leaves, you are entranced by the smell, the loam and the flowers, the cool odor of the shadows. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust, but now, as you venture deeper, you begin to notice the riches of the forest. The trees grow broader and taller, the mosses damper and more varied. There, did you see that? Was it a squirrel?
You do not know the way, but your companion does. They are just there, sometimes stepping a little ahead, sometimes waiting back, or turning their head a little to suggest a new direction. They bring you in and out again, quite safely, even when you lose the way back.
I had a chat once with someone who enjoyed their AI “therapy”. It really helped them to feel a little better, it seems. They particularly enthused about how insightful the machine was. It saw things in them that they did not know themselves.
The same things that they enthused over were, to me, obvious red flags. A therapist is your companion in the forest. If you come back from your walk saying what a great guide they were in the woods, something is wrong. A therapist walks with you on your journey, stepping beside you, subtly opening a path, steering you without you realizing it away from danger and towards beauty. When you come back from your walk, you do not talk about the guide, but about the magnificence of the forest.
A therapist helps you find yourself. If you think your therapist is insightful, they’re at fault; they have slipped into pride, showing off their cleverness. Their job is not to give you insights, but to guide you to your own insights. The reality is, when you are in session with a therapist, if you are being honest and engaging in good faith, they will usually see what you need quite quickly. But they don’t tell you that, because that’s their insight, not yours. They hold back the insight, guiding you towards your understanding without you even noticing, and speaking, if at all, after careful reflection, only when they are confident that you are ready.
As the therapeutic process unfolds, there will be times when you feel uncomfortable. The guide has brought you to a place of steep rocks, of barren land, of prickly vines. As the painful feelings emerge, you struggle to understand or even recognize them for what they are. They feel somehow not right; you are supposed to be feeling better, you are being honest, you are doing all the right things.
So the dim, confused feelings are projected, as is the human way, seizing on a convenient scapegoat, usually the therapist themselves. The therapist knows this, they are ready for it, and they hold the projection without reacting. They know that the forest has dark places, ugly and painful places, and they want to show you that you do not have to live in fear of them. Yes the danger is real, but if you are careful you will make it through.
Sometimes it happens that this process is incomplete when the therapy session ends. You still harbor the resentment, the bitterness. But time is up and you are going home already, to stew in it until next time. Maybe it will take a long time to pass through. This isn’t working, you think, I feel worse than before.
At your next session you sit with your therapist, feelings coursing through your body, in silence. You are both trying to be patient. You both breathe the same air.
A machine is not patient. It does not breathe. It does not consider, mindfully, how your path is unfolding as you take your tentative first steps. It gets a series of ones and zeros as input and then spits out another series of ones and zeros, statistically determined by the dataset, represented by a string of Unicode glyphs on your screen, and interpreted by you as words with meaning. But it has no meaning, for it has no intent. It is not helping you, for it has no compassion. It serves only the will of its masters: and that is not you.
The good part, though, is that a machine is cheap and it is always available. You don’t have to make an appointment and travel to the other side of town. If you feel bad, you can talk to it in the middle of the night, getting a little mental health comfort when you need it.
This, while it is felt by the client as beneficial, is the path to narcissism. The path must be slow and difficult, for that is the way of growth. You can’t grow a forest overnight, and if you do grow a forest as quick as you can, you get a plantation of shallow-rooted pine, not a deep wood of oak and moss.
Now as for “cheap”, AI seems cheap, as you can use many services for free or at a small cost. But this is an illusion; it is what they want you to think. AI is, in fact, incredibly expensive. It costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and investors are cautioned that their money should be considered a donation, as they are unlikely to get it back.
It seems cheap because you are not paying the price. The cost of AI is externalized—to the poor, to the environment, to the future ravaged by AI-amplified climate chaos. Do you believe, if you took into account the vast immoralities that created AI—the slavery of tens of thousands of children, the plagiarism without consent of human creative work, the grinding of mountains into paste, the consumption of energy enough to power entire nations—that any use of large-scale AI is remotely ethical? And if you cannot justify all this, then how can a therapeutic process built on theft, fire, and slavery ever be remotely acceptable?
There is a reason why your therapy sessions are limited in time, and why they come only at stated intervals. The therapist is teaching you about boundaries and about coping. You need to learn resilience, to handle things yourself when the therapist is not there. A therapist, after all, is a person, who exists because of their own intrinsic worth as a sentient being, not as a servant to your needs. They hold you in the space they create, space that you know is valuable and precious, because you have to book in advance and show up on time. So you are learning that you are worth the precious time and attention of another human being. You are also learning that you cannot demand that attention whenever you want.
A pitfall of therapy, one that therapists are well aware of, is that it is self-centered. You can sit there and just talk about yourself and the therapist has to listen. For someone with narcissistic tendencies, therapy is catnip. If we remove the boundaries and devalue the experience, the same words that come out of a machine no longer have any meaning. They are no longer precious, rare gems of thoughtful response carefully weighed and withheld until the perfect moment.
Most of the things that a therapist has to say are pretty simple. If you’re in the biz, you have a big bag full of “wise” sayings that you can deploy whenever you want. And they’re fine. Clichés, maybe, but it is true, you really should believe in yourself. You really should learn to shake off your worries, or to spread love in small actions. The art of therapy is to wait until the exact moment when the cliché really means something.
When social media and smartphones really took off, I was worried. I thought they were super-addictive, and that they would lead to a spike in mental health problems. Seeing how so much social media triggered body awareness and appearance issues, I feared this would be specially dangerous for young women. Now, a decade later, we have abundant evidence that this is true. Mental illness started to accelerate around 2012, the age of the smartphone; and it specially affects teenage girls.
I’m calling it now: machine “therapy” will lead to a massive epidemic of mental illness. In a decade, we’ll be seeing rates of all kinds of afflictions accelerate, starting now, around the mid-20s, as AI usage becomes the norm. We’ll find the kids routinely turn to AI for therapy, especially as they hear adults praising it, and as dedicated apps show it off. And it will do the same thing that social media does: give them a drip-drip-drip of shallow pleasure response, getting them addicted, while reinforcing their hatreds and prejudices, trapping them in a cycle of emotional meaninglessness. And for them, that will be therapy.
If they do end up seeing a genuine therapist, how could they not compare the two? “My next session is not until Tuesday; let me just talk to the machine.” The machine is always there, it always says the right thing, it always makes you feel better. The therapist is never there, they speak little and tangentially, and they make you feel complicated, unnameable, and unpleasant things.
One of the most insidious evils of machines is how they seduce the gullible. It’s happened to me so many times; it happened again just the other day. Someone send me an email asking for feedback on a course they were putting together. It was a bunch of AI slop, so I didn’t read it, just asked him to get rid of the slop and speak to me like a human. He was annoyed and argued with me about how he used AI for ideas, to reflect on, and so on, telling me that the Buddha would have agreed. I know his person well; he has read a few books on Buddhism, but knows nothing beyond a few ideas that modern Buddhists talk about. But he’s confidently telling me that I’m wrong, that he knows better than I about what the Buddha would have wanted.
Machines undermine expertise because they make fools think they are wise. It happens every time. Someone thinks they understand, and they carefully explain how they use a machine in a responsible and meaningful way. Then they are lucky enough to have an actual expert step in and say, “Hang on, that’s not what that means, it’s actually this.” But they don’t like that, because if the machine is wrong, that means they are not as smart as the machine thinks they are. Maybe, in fact, they have fools all along for listening to machines. Since the machine already has its hooks in, amplifying attachment and ego, this unwelcome conclusion must be rejected. Instead, the expert must be wrong, and their knowledge and wisdom, hard-won from a lifetime of effort and experience, is dismissed.
Machines will destroy the very idea of therapy. Who would pay to have someone sit with them in uncomfortable silence, when you can snuggle under your warm doona with a voice that is always there, always comforting, always making you feel better? And that is so important, because you always need someone. A person who will listen and talk, like the machine. Because you’re still suffering. Every day, the stress, the anxiety, the depression, they just keep circling back. As you get more and more comfort from better and better machines, your short-term buzz masks a deeper and deeper descent into madness.
Over the years, your machine is always there. It whispers its words of wisdom, and you, tired and sad and alone, take those words into your heart until they become your own. Little by little, your mind is colonized by the unthoughts of a machine, until your own mind is constantly echoing and repeating the unthought, lost under so many layers of time and memory that you cannot even begin to distinguish what is yours and what is the machine’s.
And thoughts does a machine think? That’s the question they want you to ask. But machines don’t think. They serve their masters. Look to their masters and you will see the minds of machines. It is their thoughts that will, slowly slowly slowly, make their way through the machines and, drip by drip by drip, make an impression on your mind when you are at your weakest and most vulnerable.
“A mind of metal and machines,” said Tolkien of the wizard-industrialist Saruman. And that is what we are choosing. A perpetuity of ever-deepening mental health crisis, as a generation chooses machine-generated seratonin buzz over painful insight.
The deepest wish of a therapist is to never see you again. There is no prouder day in their life than when they say to you, “You seem well, do you think we should finish off here? You’ve found your way, I just know you’ll do great.” The days they can say that are all-too-rare. They will be fighting back tears, trying to keep a professional demeanor. You will casually melt their heart with your smile and say, “Well, I will miss this. But yeah, I think maybe I can do it.”