Can AI replace therapy?

What happened when I asked AI for advice

If you have ever typed, ‘What is the meaning of their subjective glance?’ to an AI chat box, this is for you.

AI has made everything so easy and accessible. I won’t talk about the benefits or the repercussions of AI, there are enough people doing that. What I am going to talk about is just the emotional side of it. What really happens when we rely on an AI chat box to be our therapist or counsel or friend.

And don’t worry, I am not above this. I have done it too when I was spiraling, thinking about why a friend would suddenly decide to stop talking to me and call our friendship a formality. When that friendship was one of the most cherished relationships I had in my life. I couldn’t make sense of it.

None of my friends could make sense of it either. I turned to AI and I told the chat box about my entire situation. How I have this friend and I have been friends with her for around ten years and today, out of nowhere, I received a long text from her saying that she would like to have some space and that I should not try to call her. My other friends suggested that I should call her anyway.

That if I had texted something like that to them, they would call me. So I did, against my better judgement. I prefer to listen to what people say regardless of what they might want at times. I take people at their face value most of the time and when I think that I shouldn’t, I usually ask them. But I didn’t really have that choice either this time. She was not really willing to talk and she didn’t pick up my call.

But I couldn’t stop thinking. What had happened? I had forgotten her birthday. I knew that. I had profusely apologised for it. And she said that it didn’t affect her. I had not forgotten the date, to be honest. I had just forgotten what date we were living presently and I realised maybe two weeks after her birthday had passed. I knew that was a really big thing to forget. I had fucked up and I was willing to do the work needed to gain an apology, in the real sense. So, in a way, I understood it. I saw how the friendship might have felt like a formality.

Deciding when she was done with the friendship was her right but being affected by it was mine.

And I still am affected by it by the way. I still wonder and looking at her Instagram pictures still hurts at times. I don’t know what is happening in her life and I would love to have that privilege. So, yes, coming back to asking AI if there was anything that I could do to make it better. It told me to respect her boundaries and give her space. Which is perfectly good advice. But right after that I presented the argument that my other friends had about calling her.

And the AI chat box agreed. It said that yes, definitely, I should call her up. And keep trying to get in touch. And then just for fun, because I had seen how easily it changed its perspective, I made an argument for respecting her wishes. And there it was again, agreeing with me.

AI is really good at a lot of stuff and I know that we can edit the settings for it to challenge us, to not agree with us until it really agrees. But that’s the problem. AI responds using the information available on the internet itself. If there were more articles on the internet about Hitler being a good person than bad, it would tell you that Hitler is bad. AI is even giving worse responses now because of the amount of AI slop on the internet. Such an irony.

What scared me wasn’t that AI gave bad advice. It was how quickly it could become whatever I needed it to be. A friend who agreed. A therapist who validated. A coach who reassured. A witness who nodded.

And when you’re hurting enough, that can feel indistinguishable from being understood. But understanding is not the same thing as agreement. Sometimes the people who help us most are the ones who can see something we can’t. The ones who challenge our story instead of completing it. The ones who are willing to misunderstand us a little while trying to understand us better. AI gave me answers. What I actually needed was another human.

Sometimes what keeps us stuck isn’t the situation itself. It’s the story we keep telling ourselves about it. If you’ve been looping on something and can’t seem to find solid ground, I created Loop Breaker for exactly that. A focused written breakdown of one recurring situation, pattern, or emotional loop. Get yours here: