Are You AI?
Before I started my master’s in counselling, I volunteered for a text-based crisis line. It was new territory for me. I’d held empathetic conversations before, as a friend, and as a community member—but in the training, I learned some new and very specific skills I needed to be a safe listener for a person in crisis. I learned new ways of listening; I practiced new ways of speaking. Some came easily, but others felt unnatural and even blunt to me, and I knew they would require long hours of practice to hone. I came into my first shift excited, full of untested technique and eagerness to help, and nervous.
I remember the feeling in my body on my first shift, as I engaged with my first texter. Seeing their messages appear in the text window, I felt surges of adrenaline, cold flashes of urgency through my chest, and a sense of weight—the gravity of the situation, the responsibility I felt to connect as authentically as possible despite the limitations of the medium, the heaviness that I imagined the texter feeling as they reached out to talk to a stranger. The first conversation I took is imprinted in me, bodily, because I was fully there, all of me, alert, anxious.
And I also remember this—at some point in that conversation (near the beginning, I think), the texter on the other end asked me: “Are you AI?” In the moment, I think, it didn’t register too deeply. I assured the texter that I was human, and I mentally noted that my messages might have been coming across as too robotic—a sign of my inexperience, and a tendency I think I overcame quickly. But looking back, I see something poignant in that question I didn’t clock in the moment.
When we talk, our bodies talk too, and they speak the language of emotion. When we reach out, others respond to us. It happens below the level of our consciousness—something flashes on another’s face, and we read it; our bodies react, we sense the feeling, and we make meaning of it. What was that look? Are they frustrated with me? I feel something—shame? Anger? Am I talking too much?
We read cues in others, and these cues help us determine if we’re in a safe situation, one where the trouble we feel might be lessened by another’s grounded presence. These cues might help us settle. We might look across the room, as in a therapy session, and see our counsellor’s open expression, their eye contact, relaxed smile, their expression inviting us to speak. We notice their relaxed body posture. Our nervous system takes a cue from theirs; our capacity to stay within our window of tolerance increases the more they show us that they are themselves grounded, able to hold what we are temporarily handing them.
Thinking back to that texter’s question—“are you AI?”—I hear the meaning in it differently now. On that first shift, I read the question as criticism. My voice sounded too cold to be authentic, maybe, or perhaps I was missing the point of something the texter was trying to tell me. I think, now, that I could have read it as a plea for reassurance, delivered across a disembodying medium: is there a whole person on the other end of the phone who can help me hold my worries, who can sit with me and stay grounded as I struggle?
When I hear about people—particularly young people—reaching out to AI as a substitute for therapy, I feel deep concern. A part of it, sure, is just an elder millennial’s shock at the pace of technological change (because when I was a kid, et cetera). And, I’ll own it: part comes from a beginning counsellor’s dread that he might one day be replaced by a computer. But more than that, I lament for the people in need who are being let down, because AI cannot ever be a substitute for the genuine human contact of good therapy.
Therapy is more than just the words we say. AI, we know, is a deft wordsmith. It responds to us instantly, and it speaks in the voice we wish it to. AI never struggles, as I did on my first night at the crisis line, to say its piece eloquently while staying within the character limit. But AI cannot hold our pain, our sadness, our grief. It cannot make us feel less alone, the way another human can—even one who is struggling to find the right words to say.
As the hours and days went on at the crisis line, my body grew used to the assignment. I took grounding breaths each time I opened a chat window to start a conversation and welcome another person and their story into my space. I learned to sit with the texter, even if we weren’t physically sitting together; I learned to infuse warmth into my messages, so that they could feel our shared humanity and imagine my grounding presence. When texters shared stories of heartbreak, worry, and loss, I felt those things along with them.
For a few moments, I think, we both felt less alone.
