AI therapy isn’t getting better. Therapists are bad

When talk therapy offers only comfort without clarity, people increasingly turn to algorithms instead

- JONATHAN ALPERT

AI's ANSWERS may be reckless, but the format is quick, confident and direct -- and addictive.

(LEON NEAL Getty Images)

A GROWING NUMBER of people are turning to Al for therapy not because it’s now smarter than humans, but because too many human therapists stopped doing their jobs.

Instead of challenging illusions, telling hard truths and helping build resilience, modern therapy drifted into nods, empty reassurances and endless validation. Into the void stepped chatbots, automating bad therapy practices, sometimes with deadly consequences.

Recent headlines told the wrenching story of Sophie Rottenberg, a young woman who confided her suicidal plans to ChatGPT before taking her own life in February. An AI bot offered her only comfort; no intervention, no warning, no protection. Sophie’s death was not only a tragedy. It was a signal: AI has perfected the worst habits of modern therapy while stripping away the guardrails that once made it safe.

I warned more than a decade ago, in a 2012 New York Times oped, that therapy was drifting too far from its core purpose. That warning proved prescient and that drift has hardened into orthodoxy. Therapy traded the goal of helping people grow stronger for the false comfort of validation and hand-holding.