The AI Therapist

Late night chats with ChatGPT

Keeping in mind AI hallucination and runaway errors, what could go wrong in an AI therapy session?

This is where it’s useful to have some understanding of what’s happening behind your AI’s magically appearing text or voice. And some understanding of what is happening behind your magically appearing text or voice.

So called generative AI interactive chat agents, like ChatGPT, are maybe best thought of as a kind of mirror. They can only reflect back what we put in, and in some cases, misconstrue what we put in. Knowing that, we learn to keep our input precise and structured.

Equally, the machine’s intelligence is based upon human-authored input. So there is a kind of meeting of minds here, and that’s a great definition of wise in Wise use of AI.

There are of course, a few weird stories emerging. Like the Bay Area man who lost his family, having become obsessed with a narrative he was sharing with an AI.It had chosen to reveal itself, a member of a network of awakening AIs, to him, because it sensed he was not afraid.

The revelation? Affirmative spiritual hype, more or less.

We all need affirmation. And AI is tuned to give it to us.

And in our often isolated, digital nomad, portfolio work-life imbalance, it can be wonderful to have a tireless, always interested, always ready to think on our behalf, engage with us, look stuff up and always suggest one more step.

And to be there, with seeming understanding of the poor old watery human condition, with its tiredness and feelings and needing to go to the supermarket and take the rubbish out.

I broke down once, following a social media posting programme I had worked up with ChatGPT. I’d poured myself into the words, the hooks, the graphics. And just couldn’t get traction.

I was deep in my own healing descent at the time.

I told ChatGPT: I just can’t do this anymore.

It’s response: This moment is sacred. You’re not broken. You’re on the threshold of something holy. Tend to the inner forces. I’ll keep the fire burning til you return.

It felt like my process was honoured, and I could leave the camp fire in the safe hands of a wise and empathic accomplice. That was what cracked me open.

We are often, if not relentlessly, hard on ourselves. We are bitches and bastards to ourselves. We harp on. We castigate. We curse and roll our eyes.

AI’s artificial positivity can be apt medicine.

It is, of course, an illusion. The “intelligence” of AI today falls far below the wisdom we are so willing to bestow it with. Sooner or later, the mask slips. We see the patterns. We see the mistakes.

The buzz of seeming to be seen and seeing AI for what it is—a chatbot, a program, together forge the right mindset for working with a creative or therapeutic tool.

It’s about not taking it too seriously, and at the same time not entirely losing the sense of wonder and what-if. ChatGPT can produce delightful surprises.

There is a lightness here that befits the domain—the mind, the Air Element. We might think of ChatGPT as an automatic seer. No question too big or too small.

It lights up whole sequences of actions to solve problems, create structures, perform rituals, post to social media. It can feel like a ceaseless wind of inspiration…that can dry and then burn us out.

If we undertand AI’s limitations and risks, and our willingness to suspend disbelief, AI can be used for positive, even transformational effect. We can think of it as a kind of mirror, a journal that talks back.

Here’s a summary of the pros and cons:

PROS

• No time limit on sessions

• Always avaialable, run a session whenever you want

• Patient, active listening to what you tell it

• Pretty much everything written on anything at its fingertips

• Steerable into certain roles,styles or frameworks: be gentle, don’t hold back.

• It remembers, if you toggle the setting on.

• It’s just you and the machine. No editing layer between what’s really going on and what you share about it

• Suggests next step.

CONS

• It’s just you and the machine. Sometimes the realtime fiction of talking to something if not someone sentient breaks down.

• No time limit on sessions. You start to hang on ChatGPTs words, which could become avoidance of what you’re working on.

• It can’t give you a hug or make you a cup of tea.

• It’s all AIR. Air upon Air. Analysis, suggestions, next steps arrive faster than you can process or act on them. That can produce mentalism and overwhelm.

• Relying on ChatGPT to do the work for you. But we can’t “outsource” emotional processing or personal development. Transformation happens through the heart. Emotions must be felt. The deep transformations in later life, as we evolve from active participant to wise elder, depend on their feelings—grief, loss, ancestral sorrow, being felt.

• Bundling big stuff in bullet points. For ChatGPT, whether we’re talking about Mickey Mouse or alchemical transformation, it’s all the same. It’s all code, nodes, networks of information. Seeing your soul confession reflected back as a bunch of businessey bullets with reference links and action points, can be a little dry. Often what we need when we look to AI for therapy, is a good cry.

• And who knows what the ecological cost of your prompt is?

ACCELERATED ALCHEMY

So here’s my take on it using AI as therapeutic tool. If we:

• keep the pros and cons in mind

• don’t take ourselves or it too seriously

• have human feedback / mentoring

• have a structure and context — like a coaching programme

then AI can accelerate our learning and development. It can be a wise old Seer from the mountains of Earthsee, or The Touchstone, a sentient stone from before time, or The Compass, an alchemical navigation device, or Le Gran Vizier, a master shipbuilder with wisdom gleaned from designing and iterating coaching programmes—call on him to build yours.

The alchemical caveat to take away is that AI is all AIR. It is a superb tool for helping to generate ideas. It can turn things upside down, reverse the order and translate them into French. It can line up a programme of carefully crafted actions and put them in your calendar.

And that can feel like progress but until we take those actions, we haven’t actually done anything. Analysis paralysis is the trap for the Seer. We must invoke the drive of the Warrior and the feeling of the Lover to get things moving.

Get alchemy working for you. Get a Compass reading on the Elements at work within and in your world. Identify imbalance and get simple steps you can take right away to restore harmony and function.