I recently watched a YouTube video from psychiatrist Andrew van der Vaart entitled “The End of Therapy.” As a therapist myself, the name of the video almost spooked me to the point of avoiding it. I took the plunge, though, and am so glad I did. Dr. van der Vaart excellently and succinctly summarized the basis of my own rivalry with Dr. ChatGPT: AI was designed by humans, but not designed like humans—AI is meant to provide a very positive set of exchanges between you and it in order to keep you coming back.

This pleasurable feature of AI can be wildly helpful to us in our everyday lives. I use AI tools frequently to help summarize the mountain of literature I want to read but don’t have time to dive deep into, as well as for less academic pursuits like f inding the best water bottle for travel. Once, I tried talking to ChatGPT in a moment of distress over the holidays, when my own therapist was occupied with (presumably) her own holiday stressors. When I voiced my concern over not being able to enjoy the holidays as much as I wanted to this large language model, it gave me tips for how to survive the holidays and increase the pleasure of doing so. It felt good to tell anyone—or anything—about my inability to be present, and the tips were… fine. They weren’t groundbreaking, they weren’t particularly tailored to me as an individual, but they also weren’t damaging—certainly not enough to keep me from using it in future situations.

 I meditated and focused on what I could control, attempting to enjoy my homemade baked ziti and aunt’s bruschetta, my cousin’s sense of humor, and the lights on the Christmas tree. None of ChatGPT’s advice was lost on me. I, too, have suggested these tactics to my clients: focus on what you can control (yourself), practice mindfulness, and attempt to focus on the positives. What distinguishes my role as a psychotherapist from ChatGPT, then?

I think this is another area where Dr. van der Vaart hit the point on the head in his video: therapy is not only about validation. ChatGPT is an advanced tool for exactly that—validation. A validation therapy tool can offer many benefits, but the work of therapy is where real reflection and meaning-making exists. The process of undergoing psychotherapy is not simply the work of making a client feel better. The drive to feel better at all costs can lead to avoidance of our reality and perhaps even more suffering than when we started. Pain and suffering are inevitable parts of life. Working through our suffering without the attempt to paper over it helps us generate meaning in our lives, and strengthens our spirits for encountering it the next time.

If a client is ever feeling lost and seeking validation, I would never steer them away from ChatGPT (and similar AI tools). These bots can provide spaces for expressing and organizing thoughts, and perhaps most importantly, validate. But our lives were not meant to be validated at every turn. We are humans: we have relationships with other humans, fall in love, make mistakes, enrich our lives with new perspectives, lose loved ones, and die ourselves. These experiences cannot only be met with validation. They have to be met with curiosity, collaboration, exploration, and challenge. Psychotherapy is the exact place where these processes occur.