AI can imitate empathy, but it cannot truly know or relate to another human being.

What really heals in therapy is the relationship and the understanding this involves.

Human understanding comes from the lived experience, embodiment, and relatedness of the person.

AI is not a person, and will never be, which means it is forever excluded from real therapeutic change.

The idea that therapy-bots could become the predominant suppliers of mental health care is not a fantasy; it’s an emerging reality in some people’s view. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude have completely redefined what artificial intelligence is capable of, and along with it, have convinced some people that the realm of counselling and therapy is soon to belong to AI. People are genuinely turning to LLMs for psychological and emotional help.

However, while this may seem like progress in an age defined by isolation, loneliness and unequal access to services, such simulations—however technically impressive—can only offer the illusion of understanding and relating, which are central to what is healing about therapy, as I argue below.

The Illusion of Understanding and Relating

It is vital, first, to demystify what AI actually does. ChatGPT and similar technologies are not conscious, and they are not thinking (despite what those such as Richard Dawkins may believe). LLMs are trained on vast corpora of text to recognise and reproduce statistical correlations between words and phrases. When asked a question, these systems generate responses by predicting the most statistically probable sequence of words that might follow a given prompt. This is an extraordinary computational achievement, but it is neither intelligence nor relating in any meaningful human sense—and this is vital.

John Searle’s Chinese Room argument (1980) is instructive here. A person, given a set of rules for manipulating Chinese symbols, may produce strings of characters that are indistinguishable from those of a native speaker; a native speaker on the receiving end might feel communicated with accordingly. But this does not entail that the person in the room understands anything at all, nor does it entail that they........

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