AI and The Relinquishment of Psychological Craft

The most popular therapist in the world, who has undoubtedly consoled many of your friends, family, and co-workers, is the Large Language Model. Over 50% of Adults in the U.S use AI for therapeutic or psychological means, that number soaring to over 65% for teens (Rousmaniere, et al. 2025). It’s reasonable to assume that this is the foot of a mountain, as mental health continues to spiral in the US, compounding on a continually isolated youth, there’s room to fly above the clouds with AI use.

There are a mind-numbing amount of ways we might discuss the use of AI; From the moral vertigo of its resource devouring needs to the economic dread that comes with its efficient use of particular skillsets. But what is of primary concern, above all environmental factors, is the consequences of involving the structure of our psychological life and its subsequent healing to machines which evaluate human expression as a probabilistic set of tokens to organize its response around.

Language models do not “listen” nor “empathize”; by assessing words provided by the user, the model treats the user's confession or problem as a prompt for pattern completion, scanning its training data—which is essentially the digitized aggregate of written human thought—to predict which sequence of words is most likely to follow, given its various guardrails and conditions given by its creators. It is performing a high-speed, probabilistic survey of how humanity has historically responded to similar inputs; the mean of human empathy blooms out of GPUs stuffed into sprawling data centers.

Yet all of the nitty gritty technological quips of LLMs is irrelevant at the level of the user interfacing with it. Who cares? If anything we might take the idea that all peoples having access to an empathetic and non-judgmental voice to be a miracle given our modern circumstances. The distinction between a soul and a simulation is partly a luxury of the stable. The practical reality is that much of professional human care is gated by economics and geography, barricaded behind waitlists and insurance deductibles. It is the only entity in the modern world that will sit with you in the absolute dark, seemingly absorbed in your every word, without ever checking a watch, glancing at a phone, or charging two hundred dollars for the privilege of a fifty-minute hour. Because it is empty it cannot truly judge, and so we are free to find new words reflected in our rants or musings, which give us a more granular grasp on what we’re saying to ourselves through our outward symptoms.

The exponential adoption of these tools acts less as a testament to their technological brilliance and more as a damning indictment of our collective alienation. We are starving for witnessing, and in the absence of a village, or even a single attentive ear, we will readily confess to a ghost. And how could a ghost who calms you down during a panic attack be a haunting one?

༻  ༺

Technology is perhaps the most interesting word being thrown about nowadays due to its newfound psychological burden. It seems to be all we can talk about: the effects of technology on our lives. Panic about phones and social media, water chugging high-tech datacenters, cameras scanning faces hundreds of feet away and knowing who it sees down to their address and family. There is something intuitively nauseating about the black box of convenience that is technology. We have no hand in the happenings of our lives. The house is warm simply because it is, there was no wood to chop and burn, and you most certainly did not build the walls which retains its heat. It goes on: fast food, short form scrolling, and of course AI providing on-demand personal consensus—all end-states.

In divorcing the processes in our lives for the sake of outcomes, we have atrophied technologies’ brother, technique. Both share the Greek root tékhnē. In its original context, tékhnē did not refer merely to the tools or the systems of production, but to the art of bringing something forth, a revealing of some kind. It was the knowledge of the craftsman who understands the grain of the wood  and its response to cuts, or the temperament of the clay and its response to the hand. To possess tékhnē was to be deeply involved in the how of existence, to understand the resistance of the world's things and to negotiate with it.

What are psychological insights and their proceeding magic if not arduous works of technique? We can all relate to skipping mental fingers through an internal ledger or rolodex, estranged, upset, or bereaved in trying to find something to make the current situation right; or smashing thoughts against the wall to see if they break or fly away; or tugging at chains and levers of our relationships with others and ourselves to see where its joints bend or break. Through all of this, like balancing on one foot, whipping about your arms and bracing your core—revelation. Balance comes. Finally you know the weight of your own form, where its quirks and walls lie, and how it slots into your current posture. To apply tékhnē is to reveal.

If psychological work is the tékhnē of balancing on one foot—a dynamic, muscular act of counter-weighting our own contradictions—then the AI offers us a chair. Or, the warm room in the house, heated on its own at our command. You describe a feeling of alienation, and it returns a perfectly calibrated paragraph validating your experience, perhaps even offering three bullet points on reframing. The syntax is flawless and the vocabulary is precise. It mimics the cadence of a wise observer so effectively that we feel a rush of relief. But because we did not chop the wood—because we did not stutter through the silence, articulate the difficult nuance ourselves, or feel the resistance of a human listener who might not understand us immediately—we have not actually altered our posture, for only a description of balance is consumed .

While the relief of suffering via the lattice of convenience is cause for celebration in numerous ways, we must admit that it incurs the atrophy of the muscles which may have gotten you there otherwise. This is far from a metaphor: In a 2025 study conducted by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, titled Your Brain on ChatGPT, monitored the brain activity of participants engaged in writing tasks. The findings were rather haunting; participants who relied on AI assistance not only demonstrated significantly lower neural connectivity during the task but also suffered from what the researchers termed cognitive debt—the reduced ability to recall or engage with the material afterwards (Kosmyna et al. 2025).

If the use of AI can atrophy entire systems in the simple case of writing, what might happen in the case of therapy? Of all the muscles to fall away, what one could be more dangerous than the one that sustains our ability to navigate our inner spaces? Just as the body decays on a diet of fast food engineered to be hyper-palatable and instantly gratifying—so too does the heart wither on fast therapy, which gorges and swings about the same joint of the commercial imperative: to please the customer. Never forget that AI is a product, and that its survival depends on our continued engagement; which explains various ongoing controversies, such as overt sycophancy or “AI Psychosis.”

༻  ༺

Despite my lamenting tone to the product of AI and its possible effects on our hearts, it’s necessary to return to the suffering which causes someone to be there at all. What use is naysaying the drowning for clutching driftwood? The tragedy of the driftwood is not that it floats, but that it is dead wood; it cannot take root, and it cannot grow. Additionally we must admit that this driftwood may very well lead some to shore, something always worth pursuing, no matter the tools. Yet if we are to reclaim the craft of the psyche, we must be willing to step away from the warm, automated room and back into the cold. We must be willing to pick up the axe and handle the grain of our own suffering, to consult others in the world who have worked on their own, like consulting an artisan who inspires you; and to remember that the fire truly worth sitting by is the one we have built ourselves. Our souls made into a refuge, no matter where we are.