AI therapy surprised me. But I won't be ditching my human therapist just yet

I’ve tried my hardest to avoid AI. My wife works in publishing and tells me it will crush creativity and culture, silence human voices and – most worryingly of all – impact our household income. As a ‘content creator’ myself (bleurgh) I am aware I should be afraid of the threat posed to my career by robots.

Once, out of curiosity and egotism, I tasked ChatGPT with creating a piece of writing in the style of Sam Delaney. Reading it back made me hate myself even more than usual. It was obnoxious and trite, full of cliche and deeply unwarranted self-satisfaction. I choose to believe that AI was incapable of accurately impersonating the nuance and subtlety of my prose. But perhaps I was just unable to face the stark reality of my own reflection. 

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You might well be suspecting the words you are reading right now have been generated by artificial means. Don’t worry, I would never rip off Big Issue like that – it’s a great magazine with an important mission and I will always make it my business to deliver articles created exclusively by my own brain and fingers. 

I read that a growing number of young people are now turning to AI for therapy. I was initially cynical. From my experience, therapy is all about making a connection. The advice you receive from one therapist to the next might not differ hugely. It’s the tone of the therapy that makes all the difference. When I first saw a therapist, I was dubious at the prospect of a German-sounding egghead asking me about my mother. It all clicked into place when I met someone who spoke the same language as me. She swore, she laughed, she shared experiences that were similar to my own. This disarmed me, removed fear of judgement and made the experience feel like a useful and enjoyable chat. I didn’t think that sort of chemistry could be recreated with a computer.

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But, in the interests of thorough research, I decided to try it out. Just prior to writing this piece, I went onto an AI platform and asked simply: ‘Can you be my therapist?’ The platform replied it would be happy to try to help me with my problems but reminded me that it was not a professional and that I should seek out a trained human if I was in any serious drama. I was impressed by its honesty. I started pitching it some of my current sources of anxiety. I readied myself for generic platitudes.

I’ll admit, I have become a therapy snob over the years. I’ve sat in so many sessions, digested so much self-help literature, done a bit of professional training and even knocked out a couple of books, all of which has rendered me slightly jaded and hard to impress. I’m like one of those record-store weirdos who can only be moved by the rarest of deep cuts. 

But I have to tell you, my AI therapist surprised me. It gave me good advice, asked me relevant questions and managed to put me at ease. It actually helped. It was so direct and pragmatic in its responses. And yet somehow it wove a sense of genuine empathy into its words. The dynamic allowed me to improve my own role in the conversation. Usually, I am a rambler, who will eat up most of an hour-long session by going off on tangents or trying to be funny. But when I was just looking at my laptop screen, those instincts were not present. I just wrote down my worries in short, stark sentences and the computer replied with uncanny understanding and warmth. It was a strange experience but a good one. 

I think anyone could benefit from a bit of therapy. It can be a massive help when life gets too much. I’ve got a brilliant human who does that for me every Wednesday and I won’t be ditching her for ChatGPT just yet. But if you can’t access conventional therapy and could do with some helpful guidance, I can recommend giving AI a go. Just don’t tell my wife I sent you.

Read more from Sam Delaney on his Substack.

His new book Stop Sh**ting Yourself: 15 Life Lessons That Might Help You Calm the F*ck Down is out now (Little, Brown, £22) and is available from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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