{"id":569900,"date":"2026-05-06T21:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T21:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/569900\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T21:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T21:08:11","slug":"what-ai-will-never-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/569900\/","title":{"rendered":"What AI Will Never Do"},"content":{"rendered":"

The idea that therapy-bots could become the predominant suppliers of mental health care is not a fantasy<\/a>; it\u2019s an emerging reality in some people\u2019s view. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude have completely redefined what artificial intelligence<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

However, while this may seem like progress in an age defined by isolation, loneliness<\/a> and unequal access to services, such simulations\u2014however technically impressive\u2014can only offer the illusion of understanding and relating, which are central to what is healing about therapy, as I argue below. <\/p>\n

The Illusion of Understanding and Relating<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> nor relating in any meaningful human sense\u2014and this is vital.<\/p>\n

John Searle\u2019s Chinese Room argument<\/a> (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 are relating to the other person. The person inside the room knows nothing of Chinese\u2014they are merely manipulating signs\u2014nor what is going on inside the other person. It is all completely foreign. <\/p>\n

Understanding involves knowledge and awareness of the meaning and intent of the symbols used, and relating involves the experience of interpersonal exchange. None of this is present in the experiment, and none of this is present for the LLM. Even though such systems can produce fluent, emotionally resonant language, and so appear as if they understand, they have no understanding at all of what they are \u201csaying,\u201d and they have no sense at all that they are relating to anyone.<\/p>\n

Verstehen and the Psychotherapeutic Encounter<\/p>\n

To understand why this matters for psychotherapy<\/a>, we must revisit the foundational difference between explanation (Erkl\u00e4ren) and understanding (Verstehen) articulated by Wilhelm Dilthey (1883\/1989). Erkl\u00e4ren belongs to the natural sciences: it is objective and seeks causal relationships, generalisable patterns, and predictive models. This is the realm in which AI excels. Verstehen, by contrast, is interpretive and subjective. It involves grasping subjective meanings from within\u2014empathically entering into another\u2019s experiential world\u2014\u201cfeeling into.\u201d This is something only humans can do. <\/p>\n

Psychotherapy and counselling, at their core, are Verstehen-based disciplines. While we may draw on psychological theories that rely on explanation, the essence of our work is subjective, relational, and interpretive. Understanding, in this sense, isn\u2019t a mode of information gathering or a type of explaining (which is what AI is doing); it is a mode of being and relating (which is what AI is not doing and cannot do). It requires emotional and empathic<\/a> resonance felt by the other, not performed, and it requires a subjectivity that knows, first hand, what suffering is, what fear<\/a> is, what loss feels like, and so on. AI, by its very nature, is incapable of this. The point of understanding, unlike explaining, is that it opens up a mutual, shared experience between people at a kind of depth \u2014 and it is this, what it opens up, that is the basis of what is healing. <\/p>\n

The Embodied Mind and the Situated Self<\/p>\n

Once we recognise this, it also becomes clear that understanding is inseparable from embodiment. Human beings are not, despite what those enthusiastic for AI therapy may believe, disembodied information-processing systems. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) famously argued, \u201cthe body is our general medium for having a world.\u201d The world becomes meaningful to us only because we encounter it as embodied beings situated within it; without embodiment, there is no world or others in the human sense, only data devoid of significance. We need bodies to understand: to understand involves being able to feel, to sense, and to exist as a living body in contact with other living bodies in a shared world. <\/p>\n

Murray Stein <\/a>(2025) puts it like this: \u201cHuman intelligence, thinking, and knowing derive from unquantifiable intangibles\u2026 the unique amalgam of being alive in our bodies in a time and place, cognisant of our inevitable mortality, and in relationship to others and they with us.\u201d AI, lacking embodiment, is fundamentally excluded from this mode of existence, and, as such, to the very conditions of what is central to counselling and psychotherapy.<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence Essential Reads<\/p>\n

Failure, Fallibility, and the \u201cGood Enough\u201d Therapist<\/p>\n

The last point I wish to make\u2014and one that represents the nail in the coffin for AI therapy from a humanistic and relational perspective\u2014is the central importance in therapy of one of our most deeply human capacities: the capacity to err, to fall short, to not care, to be misattuned. In other words, our imperfection, incompleteness, and our limitation.<\/p>\n

One of the founding fathers of modern psychoanalysis<\/a>, Donald Winnicott (1969), famously said, \u201cThe patient makes use of the analyst\u2019s failures. Failures there must be.\u201d (Winnicott, 1958\/1992, p. 298). Elsewhere, he wrote, \u201cI think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding\u201d (\u201cThe Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications,\u201d 1969). Similarly, Carl Rogers (1995), a central pillar in humanistic counselling, said, \u201cI believe it is the realness of the therapist in the relationship\u2026 the person who is able openly to be himself at the moment\u2026 [who] is the effective therapist. Perhaps nothing else is of any importance.\u201d<\/p>\n

What heals in this sense is not perfect attunement or explanatory precision, even if this were possible in any real sense. On the contrary, healing often emerges precisely where certainty, understanding, and attunement begin to break down. It is through the shared negotiation of difference, limitation, rupture, and repair that we find each other\u2014and in therapy, the client finds themselves\u2014not just in presence, but in spite of presence, when it fails and falls away, and we have to grow in the space that remains.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the question is not whether artificial intelligence can convincingly imitate therapy; it already can. The question is whether therapy is about the kind of thing that AI can do; it is not. From a humanistic and relational perspective, it is an encounter between embodied, vulnerable, finite human beings who meet one another within the limits of their understanding and relating that does the real work. AI cannot do this, and will never be able to do this, not because it lacks sophistication or complexity, but because it lacks personhood. It has no body, no past, no fears, no hopes. It does not long or desire, and it does not suffer. In short, it is not\u2014and can never be\u2014a person.<\/p>\n

We must not be seduced by the illusion that technological mimicry is equivalent to human understanding and relating. What heals is not what therapists say or do for their clients, but who they are for them \u2014 a realm in which AI is forever excluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The idea that therapy-bots could become the predominant suppliers of mental health care is not a fantasy; it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-569900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}