<h2 class="wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper">AI anxiety</h2>

"My life is awful." Sarah tells her therapist. "My best friend has stopped talking to me. I hate school. My parents have grounded me." The therapist beeps: "You need to go to the human repair shop. There you will be rewired and have new batteries installed. Tell them that RV896 sent you. Next please!"

This is a comic vision of how a human being might interact with an AI therapist. But for many people the subject has become a very serious one.

Just over a year ago, psychology student Sam Zaia came up with a chatbot called Psychologist. It has now received 78 million messages and is visited by 3.5 million people a day.¹

Sam trained the bot using what he had learned on his course. He did it so he would always have "someone or something" to talk to at difficult moments.

"So many people who've messaged me say they access it when their thoughts get hard, like at 2am when they can't really talk to any friends or a real therapist," he says. He adds that for many young people, texting is less daunting than talking to someone on the phone or meeting them face to face.

Two other popular therapy chatbots are Earkick and Woebot. Earkick's creators claim that users' moods improve by 34% within five months.

In the UK, some NHSThe National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK. The NHS was founded in 1948. trusts are already using a chatbot called Limbic Access for people taking the first step towards counselling. The company claims that it is 93% accurate in classifying the most common mental health problems.²

AI is being put to other ingeniousClever and inventive. uses. One, aimed at people who hear voices, allows them to create an avatarAn icon or figure representing someone online. whose threats and orders they can argue against. Another uses virtual reality to help with problems like fear of heights, putting patients on top of tall buildings without danger of falling.

Experts insist that none of these are substitutes for real therapists. Therapy, as Jamie Ducharme notes in TIME, is traditionally built "on human interaction, on trust and intimacy and emotional intelligence".

One psychotherapistSomeone who treats emotional problems and mental health issues. There are over 1,000 types of psychotherapy., Dr Emma Byrne, warns that patients can start to think of chatbots as real people and become attached to "an entity that appears intelligent but has no empathyThe capacity to understand and feel the suffering of others., no understanding of what it is to be human... It is the most dangerous friend you could have if you are feeling low, self-destructive or likely to do something dangerous."

Are humans the best healers?

Yes: Chatbots can be taught to ask questions, but they cannot actually understand the problems presented to them. Only a properly trained fellow human can get to the bottom of someone's difficulties.

No: All humans have flaws which can prevent them from giving the best treatment. They may not have sufficient sympathy for their patients or be stuck in their ways and blind to alternative solutions.

Or... Chatbots could relieve a therapist of basic tasks, allowing him or her to focus on the hardest part of the job. With them, more people could access mental health care, cheaply and when they need it.

NHS - The National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK. The NHS was founded in 1948.

Ingenious - Clever and inventive.

Avatar - An icon or figure representing someone online.

Psychotherapist - Someone who treats emotional problems and mental health issues. There are over 1,000 types of psychotherapy.

Empathy - The capacity to understand and feel the suffering of others.