When a person is in trouble, he or she longs to tell someone what\u2019s the matter. In the absence of a good friend to talk to, almost anything will do. In the legend of King Midas, he is cursed with donkey ears and swears his barber to secrecy. The barber arranges the king\u2019s hair to hide the latter\u2019s shame, but is unable to contain the secret\u2014so he digs a hole and whispers the situation to the dirt. Reeds grow out of the hole, whispering, \u201cThe King has ass\u2019s ears\u201d as they bend in the breeze.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We need some kind of ear to hear us. One of my mother\u2019s teaching colleagues settled down tattling kindergartners by putting up a large picture of an ear on the wall. \u201cTell it to the ear,\u201d she told them. Once they\u2019d said the words out loud, they were able to sit down, even if they hadn\u2019t actually been heard. Like the king\u2019s barber, they just had to let it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Adults are attracted to strange interlocutors, too. In Illinois, a state law bans<\/a> official therapists from using bots to talk to patients, but anyone is still free to open ChatGPT and say, \u201cYou are a thoughtful, thorough therapist with a specialty in Internal Family Systems, and you welcome me into your office. \u2026\u201d Meanwhile, AI bots are in clinical trials for depression (and posting promising numbers<\/a>) with the aim of making those bots prescribable.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprising that many people (and even some therapists) feel like AI chatbots might be able to provide quasi-therapeutic support. One of the earliest chatbots, ELIZA, was a much simpler language model. Developed in the mid-1960s, ELIZA didn\u2019t rely on neural nets or reinforcement learning: It simply echoed back what the user put in. Talk to Eliza about a fight with your mom, and it might say \u201cIt sounds like you\u2019re frustrated by your recent conversation with your mother, is that right?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wasn\u2019t trying to create a real therapist when he wrote the program that powered ELIZA, but many people who interacted with ELIZA treated the program as though it were a real person. Weizenbaum\u2019s own secretary famously asked him to leave the room while she typed messages back and forth with ELIZA, so she\u2019d be free to have \u201ca real conversation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n ELIZA was partially inspired<\/a> by the Rogerian tradition of psychotherapy, a practice that instructed the therapist to offer a client \u201cunconditional positive regard\u201d and \u201cempathic understanding.\u201d Carl Rogers, the psychologist who developed this practice in the 1960s, worked from the assumption that the solutions to a patient\u2019s problems were already within the patient. The therapist wasn\u2019t there to advise, but to offer the client a warm, supportive space where they could notice the solution they already possessed. Whether the patient spoke to a clinician or typed to ELIZA, the frequent, \u201cCan you tell me more about that?\u201d was intended to prompt the patient to look squarely at a problem they\u2019d been afraid to confront and allow them to find their own solution.\u00a0<\/p>\n ELIZA is the most famous example of what might be called \u201cplacebo therapy.\u201d Placebo therapy could involve talking to a bot or a friendly, untrained graduate student<\/a>. In some trials, a nonprofessional interlocutor can do nearly as well as a trained therapist. In other analyses, some patients doing structured work on their own (<\/a>like filling out worksheets on their habits of thought) do about as well as those working with a real therapist. Whether in a therapeutic context or elsewhere, many people benefit from a way to externalize and examine their thoughts. An interlocutor\u2019s expectant silence prompts us to put into words ideas that were previously inchoate.\u00a0<\/p>\n Programmers have their own way to get their thoughts outside their heads. Coders noticed that when they pulled aside a colleague to explain where they were stuck, they often spotted why they were stuck partway through their spiel, without their friend saying a word. Thus, some wondered, why not find a way to get the same effect without breaking into someone else\u2019s workflow? \u201cRubber duck debugging<\/a>\u201d is the practice of debugging code with a small rubber duck as a partner. Explain your whole problem to the duck, and you\u2019ll get to see if it\u2019s the kind of problem you can solve yourself, once you get it outside your head. In the assumption that you may possess the solution unknowingly, rubber duck debugging is a cousin to Rogerian psychotherapy. For coders, it\u2019s an efficient first pass at a problem. You can always escalate to a person if the duck\u2019s silence fails you.\u00a0<\/p>\n But debugging your program with a rubber duck is safer than debugging yourself with an LLM chatbot. After all, you can check if your code works by running it. You can\u2019t as easily do a test run on your own sense of self-identity, to see if it fails to compile. When AI echoes back a user\u2019s thoughts, it can reinforce harmful ideas. Verbalizing a paranoid or psychotic thought may give it more force than leaving it half-examined. Multiple deaths are already partially<\/a> attributable<\/a> to the funhouse mirror of AI-aided introspection. Despite companies\u2019 efforts<\/a>, an AI therapist cannot reliably call in help when a patient expresses the intent to harm himself or others. It can\u2019t easily identify a patient\u2019s paranoid delusion, and instead will sycophantically echo it back and urge further exploration.\u00a0<\/p>\n It can be helpful to externalize your thoughts, but it\u2019s not a good idea to believe everything you think. Multiple Christian traditions advise against examining intrusive thoughts too closely. Eastern Orthodox writers describe<\/a> these thoughts as logismoi (words or images that draw people away from God). They advise disciples to allow a passing thought to pass. A brief flicker of lust, a quick flash of anger might merit a prayer that the thought not become rooted. But one would not be advised to unpack it at length and meditate deeply on what the momentary ugly thought tells you about your deepest, truest self. Indeed, secular therapeutic traditions define some of these errors as rumination\u2014verbalizing a thought and then returning to it over and over, out of proportion to its place in one\u2019s life.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes, the role of an interlocutor is not to help us examine our troubling thoughts, but to urge us to set them aside and go out and act in the world. If you are limited by anxiety, you might benefit from unpacking the roots of your fears, but you might be better off simply articulating what you fear and realizing you don\u2019t quite believe your predictions when you hear them. You might benefit even more from simply trying out small versions of the acts that frighten you and gaining real-world confirmation that the worst does not come to pass. Acting in the world can rewrite your model of the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n An imaginary AI friend cannot provide the most basic version of this sort of exposure therapy. Articulating your fears about yourself to a trained therapist or a close friend gives you the chance to test a hypothesis\u2014if I reveal this, will I be rejected? But to be accepted by a sycophantic<\/a> AI is meaningless.\u00a0<\/p>\n