‘I can cry without feeling stigma’: meet the people turning to AI chatbots for therapy

It's cheap, quick and available 24/7, but is a chatbot therapist really the right tool to tackle complex emotional needs?

Last autumn, Christa, a 32-year-old from Florida with a warm voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother. Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn't feel she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but she didn't like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends: she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing.

So one night in October she logged on to character.ai - a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyonce to Harry Potter - and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal psychologist" character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot caring", supportive" and intelligent". Just what you would want the ideal person to be," Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.