[Opinion Piece] I Tried AI Therapy For a Week — and Here Are My Honest Thoughts
[Opinion Piece] I Tried AI Therapy For a Week — and Here Are My Honest Thoughts
I spoke to Therapist GPT for a week to see how AI holds up against a real therapy session. Here are my honest thoughts.
The author shares her experience using an AI-powered therapy chatbot called Therapist GPT for one week. As a millennial who values traditional therapy, she was initially skeptical but decided to try it out. The author describes her daily interactions with the chatbot, discussing topics like unemployment, social anxiety, and self-care. She found that the AI provided helpful reminders and validation, similar to a human therapist. However, she also noted limitations, such as generic advice and the lack of personalized insights based on body language or facial expressions. The author concludes that while AI therapy can be a useful tool for quick support between sessions, it cannot replace human therapists. She suggests that AI might be more valuable in assisting therapists rather than replacing them, and recommends using AI therapy as a supplement to traditional therapy rather than a substitute.
by Claude 3.5 Sonnet
I'd be more interested in how it compares to a real therapist. Since the author has experience with both, she could have given some insight instead of just describing her experience with the bot. For example, does a therapist have different conversation strategies? Do they pose the same questions? Do they behave and treat you differently? What would happen if it gets to a specific trauma... How does the chatbot compare to a therapy session regarding the same topic?
And yeah, it has a lot of ChatGPT vibe to its tone. The repeating, lecturing and providing alternatives and ending with a call to action or a question... I don't like that but YMMV. (And other LLMs talk differently. So there's the option of having a therapy bot with some other AI platform.)