I see the bigger risk being cultural rather than procedural. I.e., patients may reject an AI therapist when they know the therapist is AI. If the EQ gap is closed, it will be interesting to see if blinded studies reveal patient preference
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The upside of an AI therapist is that the countertransference (the therapist’s feelings about the patient) – a key tool for a therapist in understanding a patient – won’t be clouded by what’s going on in the therapist’s own life.
A huge part of a psychodynamic therapist’s training is to recognize what’s coming from the therapist’s own life (e.g., is their feeling of anxiety a projection from the patient or a consequence of their conflicts at home/work?). AI therapists won’t need to figure this out
To @nicolecrust.bsky.social‘s point that LLMs are miles away from having the EQ needed to compete with human therapists, there are interesting questions of what kinds of paired data could endow models with better EQ including neural data, facial expression, and non-semantic speech features
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