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As a therapist and professor myself, I’ve seen just how quickly AI has made its way into our lives. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini are most often used to answer questions, summarize or manipulate data. But a recent suggests the number one use case for generative AI is in fact therapy or companionship. Given that hundreds of millions of people are now using AI tools, this is not an insignificant trend.

Some psychologists do concede that ChatGPT can appear to fulfil the function of therapy that relies on reflecting and affirming. An AI bot can seem confidential, impartial, and accessible. A computer, after all, cannot cringe in response to a confession or judge.

But more reveal that heavy AI users aren’t being helped by AI. Instead, they are and losing their grip on reality.

I’m not surprised. In psychotherapy, you need another human being for the treatment to work; otherwise, it’s just another echo chamber. Because AI tools can’t feel or actually think, they can only mimic what (bad) therapists do: affirm convictions, enable behaviour and give advice.

But no matter how advanced the technology becomes, artificial intelligence will never have a childhood. Everyone with a childhood knows the excruciating helplessness that comes with utter dependence on another human. Without that embodied memory, AI’s gestures of empathy are meaningless. Patients can neither fully know their human therapist nor control them. Yet these two people are able to affect each other with words, and that becomes a vital tie to reality. Unlike AI, therapy doesn’t monopolize your attention, but frees you to live more fully with others.

The connection between two fundamentally different individuals is perhaps the most powerful vehicle in therapy. It’s also the most challenging to develop and sustain, which explains why so many may opt for AI. But that also means the real work is just not happening.

Even if AI users don’t suffer from psychotic delusions, the long-term emotional effects of using AI look bleak. Since the pandemic, I keep thinking about Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism.” She closes the book suggesting that fascism and tyranny depend on our inability to turn loneliness into solitude. In loneliness, we find it intolerable to be in our own skin, unable to connect to others or ourselves. Conversely, solitude comes when we have a sense of self that we can trust and retreat into, whether we’re alone or with company. Solitude makes creativity and connection possible.

In the university and the therapy consulting room, I witness struggles with loneliness among students and clients alike. We’re currently in a culture of public disclosure, where certainty, declarations about oneself and demands for allegiance reign. But these recourses are not antidotes to loneliness. On the contrary, they can exacerbate it.

There are, however, experiences that can be therapeutic which don’t require a therapist. It even involves a much older technology: the novel. Unlike AI, the novel gives us stories that we relate to, but that we can’t control. Reading these stories helps us take our time, think, imagine, feel, and talk to each other — and looking at the world today, we’ve never needed these capacities more. If we stop valuing what our human minds can do, we stop valuing ourselves and each other. The pleasures and difficulties of thinking with others become the foundation of a human life worth living. Let’s not allow AI to take that away from us.