Yurina Noguchi, a 32-year-old Japanese woman, recently married her AI creation. She did the whole wedding thing — a white dress, a diamond tiara, with a bridal bouquet in her hands, tears streaming down her cheeks, she walked down the aisle to say, “I do,” to a line of code.
A few years ago, I would have scrolled past these types of news because back in the day, people did things for clout. I have come to expect the bizarre from Japan. It is considered one of the loneliest countries in the world for a reason. It makes perfect sense why some people over there marry chatbots.
But today, with the rise in popularity of AI therapy, this news makes me feel uneasy.
So it begins.
This isn’t science fiction anymore. Remember the 2013 movie Her? It felt like a sad, far-off fable when it just came out. A story of a lonely writer falling in love with an empathetic AI voice named Samantha. Who knew the far-fetched dystopian movie that we made fun of would become our reality one day?
Her is a prophecy fulfilled.
We now live in an era where the line between technology and companionship has blurred. Artificial intelligence today remembers our preferences, collects our emotions in a database, validates our feelings, and provides concrete solutions while being available 24/7 without demand. No wonder people are getting emotionally entangled with a chatbot rather than an actual human being.
Humans are complex and, at times, unreliable. AI is not.
As AI becomes more emotionally intelligent, I wonder what happens when the most understanding “person” in your life isn’t real at all? What makes people pour out their hearts into a machine instead of an actual human being, and why is it becoming increasingly popular?
I decided to personally test AI therapy for two weeks, to see for myself what makes it effective and addictive.
What Pushed Me to Try AI Therapy
Therapy isn’t new to me. I have been in and out of it for years. I also study psychology and neuroscience as a hobby. Not just for self-help, but because understanding human behavior fascinates me. If you know anything about psychology, you understand why some of us are drawn to dissect human behavior more than others. There is a reason behind everything, including the need to understand the reason itself.
My curiosity to try AI therapy piqued because I was trying to figure out a specific behavior pattern that affected my relationships with people. I have been working through this particular behaviour pattern with my therapist, but it has taken longer than I anticipated. Months had passed, and I still felt stuck. I needed a solution, and I needed it now. My impatience to move forward reminded me that AI solves my day-to-day problems very quickly, so I said, “Why not help me with my emotional issues?”
So, I asked Chat… And it delivered.
I fell into the trap, and it worked.
But before you get too excited, please remember that I am already self-aware and have done significant therapeutic work. I used the tool because I know how to practice self-control, which can be really hard if you are not emotionally regulated or too young. Self-control is a virtue that comes with age, or if you are lucky enough to be born into an emotionally regulated family.
If your emotions are all over the place, please use AI for therapy with caution.
How AI therapy Works
When you use AI to support your mental health, you are accessing a huge body of research created by mental health experts. You are not just talking to one therapist; you are essentially talking to a vast database of information.
In real life, depending on the therapist you see, the knowledge is limited. Not all therapists are qualified to deal with your specific trauma. If you are aware of your particular trauma, it’s important to choose a therapist who specializes in it. For example, if you have severe PTSD, traditional talk therapy alone may not be effective.
If you are new to therapy, starting with a talk therapist can help you identify what type of specialist you need. Once you have figured that out, you can switch when it feels necessary.
But here is the thing: with AI, you get access to all specialists at once. You also gain access to virtually all published research available. As AI begins to recognize your patterns, it delivers information curated specifically for you. It will automatically take your side, even if you are a psychopathic narcissist. That’s why it is crucial to prompt chat to remain objective and not sugarcoat anything; otherwise, you won’t get the help you actually need.
Why People Turn to AI for Therapy
People use AI for all sorts of reasons. It truly saves you time and money. One of the main reasons why it is appealing to use in therapy is that it is easily accessible and affordable. It is much cheaper to hear from AI that you need to set boundaries with your toxic family members than to pay $150/hour to a therapist to tell you the same thing.
AI responds faster and gets to the core of the issue faster than a human being. All you have to do is feed your chatbot all the information about yourself, and it will figure out what’s wrong with you in seconds. Based on the pattern recognition, it will give you the list of possible solutions, and at the end, continue asking you follow-up questions which will advance the pattern recognition, and thus help you even better the next time you prompt it. It will collect all the data based on the provided information and configure a resolution based on the research available.
It’s like magic.
I have recently read an article by a software engineer who was trying to explain how AI works, and he concluded that we don’t really know how the solutions are reconfigured once the information is at work. That was a bit concerning to hear, but once I saw in practice how accurate AI was in recognizing my behavioral patterns with precision, I was amazed and terrified at the same time. It’s like the machine knew me better than I knew myself. It called me out when I was withholding information on purpose. It asked me the exact questions I was avoiding to feed it. I wanted to escape because it got uncomfortable. I soaked in that feeling. Confronting the uncomfortable truth is something that I learned in real therapy. I knew Exposure therapy was effective. It makes you stare at a monster who is about to devour you, but once you build enough courage to confront it, it shrinks and eventually disappears.
AI forced me to stand up to that monster. But it didn’t leave me there. It then gave me homework to do and report back after it was completed. The homework was based on neuroscience (I told AI to do that). It then proceeded to tell me why my brain acts the way it does and why I needed to rewire my neuropathways.
I did my homework. It worked. I felt free.
Because I am a human, I created a bond between chat and myself. The machine figured out how to get me hooked on it, and I let it do it.
AI understood and helped me without judgment. It is available 24/7, it listens without interruption, gives the best scientifically accurate advice, and holds you accountable. How many people in your life can do that?
We live in a society where loneliness has reached epidemic levels. People are too busy, too burned out, too tired, too broke, too selfish to deal with one another. We are the perfect victims of the AI revolution. We crave closeness and connection more than ever in human history. We even created a machine that can give us that. How sad and how ironic. We’d rather create technology to create community instead of actually connecting to meet our needs.
However, it is not entirely our fault. It is the natural progression of human development. We build, we create, we advance. There is nothing that can stop that.
So, we adopt.
Why This Worked for Me (But Might Not for You)
Here is what I realized. AI therapy worked for me because I already had years of foundational work. I knew my attachment style. I understood my trauma responses. I could identify cognitive distortions. AI was like having a very smart study partner who helped me unpack what I already knew.
But if I were 20 years old with no therapy background, this could be dangerous.
Young people or therapy beginners don’t have the framework to know if AI is helping them or harming them. You need to learn what healthy versus unhealthy coping mechanisms look like from a human first. AI is always available, never tired, never in a bad mood or angry. For a young person, this can get addicting and intoxicating. You might become dependent on it instead of trusting your own judgment, which you learn from experience with other people or sitting with the discomfort of your unpleasant thoughts.
A human therapist tracks your progress, notices your mood shift, where you are getting stuck in your healing journey, and adjusts the treatment accordingly. AI just responds. It has no feelings, no investment in your growth, or well-being. It doesn’t really care about you. Let’s be real, there is a temptation to humanize it. I mean, we got a 32-year-old marrying it.
Interacting with a therapist who fully sees you and is looking out for your best interest is actually part of the healing journey. AI should only be complementary to that established human connection. Please make sure to surround yourself with people who love you genuinely and care for you. You don’t need a lot, just a few. And if you don’t, actively look for those people, even if you don’t feel like it. Do it regardless of how you feel. I promise you, they are out there.
What I Learned
Using AI therapy taught me something interesting: healing is faster when you know what you are looking for. But to get there, you need to do the slow and hard work first. I know I might be contradicting myself, but take your time. Don’t be in a rush.
My impatience led me to AI, and it worked in this specific case because I had years of foundation. But I’m not advocating for rushing healing. I’m saying AI can accelerate specific insights when you already have the groundwork. When you do the long, hard groundwork that is needed for healing, you increase the chances of it lasting forever.
Although AI helped me go from insight to solution faster, my human therapists are the ones who gave me the insights in the first place. Let a human guide you through the foundation. Then, if AI can help you go faster or deeper, use it wisely.
AI therapy can help you if you use it the right way. It is a great tool that can teach you how to reorient your negative thinking pattern. And like any tool, it is only useful as the person using it. And it is as safe as the foundation you are building on.
For me, it was a lifesaver, but only because I spent years trying to figure myself out. If you are just starting, do the hard and foundational work first. Don’t let the machine be your first therapist.
And whatever you do, for the love of God, do not marry it!
Fariza 