AI therapist

An AI therapist (or therapist chatbot) is an artificial intelligence system designed to provide mental health support through chatbots or virtual assistants.^[1] While AI therapists improve accessibility, they are not a substitute for human professionals due to their lack of emotional intelligence.^[2] Due to LLMs tendency towards sycophancy they can also fail to provide corrective therapy and endorse destructive behaviours.^[3] The earliest example of an AI which could provide therapy was ELIZA, released in 1966, which provided Rogerian therapy via its DOCTOR script. Due to the AI boom in the early 2020s, many companies have begun providing therapy chatbots such as Woebot, Earkick and Wysa.^[3]