Waiting for a digital therapist: three challenges on the path to psychotherapy delivered by artificial intelligence

Abstract

Growing demand for broadly accessible mental health care, together with the rapid development of new technologies, trigger discussions about the feasibility of psychotherapeutic interventions based on interactions with Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI). Many authors argue that while currently available CAI can be a useful supplement for human-delivered psychotherapy, it is not yet capable of delivering fully fledged psychotherapy on its own. The goal of this paper is to investigate what are the most important obstacles on our way to developing CAI systems capable of delivering psychotherapy in the future. To this end, we formulate and discuss three challenges central to this quest. Firstly, we might not be able to develop effective AI-based psychotherapy unless we deepen our understanding of what makes human-delivered psychotherapy effective. Secondly, assuming that it requires building a therapeutic relationship, it is not clear whether psychotherapy can be delivered by non-human agents. Thirdly, conducting psychotherapy might be a problem too complicated for narrow AI, i.e., AI proficient in dealing with only relatively simple and well-delineated tasks. If this is the case, we should not expect CAI to be capable of delivering fully-fledged psychotherapy until the so-called “general” or “human-like” AI is developed. While we believe that all these challenges can ultimately be overcome, we think that being mindful of them is crucial to ensure well-balanced and steady progress on our path to AI-based psychotherapy.

Hypnosis in psychotherapy, psychosomatics and medicine. A brief overview

“…Even in remote online therapy, which was frequently practiced during the Covid pandemic, users with secure attachment showed online a better therapeutic alliance than those with insecure attachment ( Mercadal Rotger and Cabré, 2022 ). Whether avatars equipped with artificial intelligence are able to achieve this is questionable ( Grodniewicz and Hohol, 2023 ), as is whether these avatars can adapt to the respective hypnotizability of their patients. It can be assumed that there will continue to be a certain number of people who are highly hypnotizable and whose neurophysiological make-up goes beyond the effects of expectation and imagination.…”

Psychological interventions for depression in children and adolescents: A bibliometric analysis

“…Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to be applied in multiple domains of mental health care in recent years, and many scholars wonder whether psychological interventions could be delivered someday by mental health chatbots in the ChatGPT era. However, there are still some challenges on the path to psychotherapy delivered by AI consisting of limited knowledge of the active ingredients of psychotherapy, therapeutic relationships delivered by non-human agents, and human-like AI being capable of delivering fully-fledged psychotherapy is undeveloped[ 43 ].…”

Potential use of large language models for mitigating students’ problematic social media use: ChatGPT as an example

“…Users may become overly reliant on chatbots, as they can access them 24/7 with just a click, potentially exacerbating addictive behavior[ 48 ]. Research has shown that autonomy is directly correlated with positive treatment outcomes and is common in effective treatment interventions[ 53 , 54 ] and that enhancing autonomy is important for reducing problematic social media use. Overcommunication with ChatGPT may lead individuals to reduce their communication and interaction with peers.…”