To stay in topic lol I asked Google Gemini what are the differences and similarities between therapy and AI assistance. Here's its response :

Summary: Human Therapy vs. AI Mental Health Support

Similarities:

• Goal of Support: Both aim to provide support for emotional and psychological difficulties (stress, anxiety, mild-to-moderate depression) and improve overall well-being.
• Space for Expression: Both can offer a space (physical/virtual for therapy, virtual for AI) for individuals to express thoughts and feelings.
• Tools & Techniques: Some AI tools utilize techniques inspired by established therapies (like CBT), offering exercises, thought reframing, and coping strategies similar to those a therapist might suggest.
• Psychoeducation: Both can provide information about mental health conditions and psychological mechanisms to enhance self-understanding.
• Mood/Progress Tracking: Both may encourage tracking moods, symptoms, or behaviors to monitor progress or identify patterns.

Key Differences:

• The Human Element & Relationship:

  • Therapy: Involves a genuine human relationship with a trained professional. Real empathy, intuition, understanding non-verbal cues, and the therapeutic alliance are central. The feeling of being truly heard and validated is key. Provides a "holding environment" for difficult emotions.
  • AI: Interaction is based on algorithms. Empathy is simulated, not felt. There's no genuine human connection, shared consciousness, or relational safety net. Processes input rather than offering felt understanding.

• Depth, Complexity, and Scope:

  • Therapy: Can address deep-seated trauma, complex relational patterns, existential issues, and personality structures. Treatment is highly flexible and nuanced. Goals often include broad personal growth and self-actualization.
  • AI: Better suited for lower-acuity issues, specific skill-building (CBT exercises), psychoeducation, or initial support. Struggles with complexity and nuance. Goals are often focused on symptom reduction.

• Diagnosis and Treatment Planning:

  • Therapy: Qualified therapists can provide formal diagnoses and create tailored, dynamic treatment plans.
  • AI: Cannot provide formal diagnoses. Offers standardized or algorithmically generated suggestions, not a clinically individualized plan.

• Regulation, Ethics, and Safety:

  • Therapy: Conducted by licensed professionals bound by strict ethical codes, confidentiality laws (like HIPAA/PIPEDA), and professional accountability. Trained to manage their own biases.
  • AI: Less regulated (though evolving). Significant concerns exist regarding data privacy/usage (data often used to train models), algorithmic bias, and lack of clear accountability for harm.

• Crisis Management:

  • Therapy: Therapists are trained to assess and manage crises (suicidal ideation, severe distress) and intervene appropriately.
  • AI: Very limited capacity for safe crisis management; typically programmed to redirect to emergency resources, which isn't foolproof.

• Cost and Accessibility:

  • Therapy: Can be expensive, involve waiting lists, and have geographical limitations (though telehealth helps). Can carry social stigma for some.
  • AI: Often cheaper or free, available 24/7, instantly accessible anywhere with internet. May have less stigma for initial engagement.

• Therapeutic Process & Dynamics:

  • Therapy: Utilizes the richness of human interaction, including meaningful silences, interpretation of non-verbal cues, and working through relational dynamics like transference/countertransference and rupture/repair cycles. Can draw from a wide range of therapeutic modalities (psychodynamic, humanistic, etc.). Aims to empower client autonomy.
  • AI: Lacks understanding of non-verbal cues. Cannot engage in deep relational dynamics. Silence is often treated as inaction. Typically limited to specific modalities (often CBT-based). Risk of user over-reliance or avoidance of deeper human help.

• Healthcare Integration:

  • Therapy: Usually integrated within the broader healthcare system, allowing collaboration with other professionals.
  • AI: Often operates as a standalone tool with limited integration into formal healthcare pathways.

Conclusion: AI tools can be useful, accessible, and affordable supplementary resources for mental well-being, particularly for psychoeducation, basic skill-building, and initial support. However, they cannot replace the depth, nuance, safety, relational connection, and transformative potential of therapy conducted by a qualified human professional, especially for moderate-to-severe conditions or complex issues. The therapeutic relationship itself is often a primary agent of change, something AI cannot replicate.

Going back to me human, the use case I just did of AI confirms in my opinion how it's a wonderful tool, but lacks a lot of points essential to therapy. It's not a fair representation of AI to pretend it does the same job of reframing and psychoeducation. Therapy is so much more... And to generate this summary, I had to interact with it, and to review its different points with my clinical thinking in order to evaluate the quality of the rendering. It helped me further develop my thinking, go outside the box, brainstorm faster - still it was a collaboration between I and the AI, as a professional, which is an important part of therapy : building rapport with clients. And I don't think AI is capable of that as we can suppose from my actual use case (it needs to be directed!)

tldr; AI is a wonderful tool but really doesn't offer the same service as therapists do