Psychological Counseling AI

The current psychological counseling AI can neither completely replace human counselors, nor is it an "electronic placebo" with no practical value. Its core positioning is an effective supplement to the existing psychological counseling service system. It is more like an on-call "emotion triager + self-service tool kit" with clear applicable boundaries and outstanding advantages and disadvantages.

Let me tell you a fact that I found out when I was operating a psychological service platform: the peak number of consultation requests in the background is not at all during the weekend and daytime as everyone thinks, but between 1 and 3 in the morning. The number of requests during this period can account for 27% of the whole day, but the number of real consultants who can respond at any time is less than 3%. One time, we received feedback from a sophomore girl in the background. She said she had an argument with her roommate at 2 a.m. and had just received a notification that she had failed to apply for graduate school. She looked through her address book and couldn't find anyone who could talk to her, so she tried to talk to the AI. She chatted with her for more than a thousand times. She was not interrupted or lectured. The AI just responded to her grievances point by point. In the end, she left the sentence "It's much better to talk about it. I will make an appointment with the teacher tomorrow to talk in detail" and then went offline. This kind of threshold-free emotional reception is the most irreplaceable value of AI.

What’s interesting is that the industry’s attitude towards psychological counseling AI almost follows the trends, and the differences are so big that they can cause quarrels in industry salons. Teacher Zhang, a supervisor who has been doing psychoanalysis for 12 years, does not recognize the value of AI in consulting at all. The last time we met, she was always gentle and just choked: "The object of the client's empathy is an algorithm with no real emotions? If you can't even get a concrete response from your subconscious projection, how can you talk about cultivating it? ”However, counselors who do CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) are generally very receptive to AI. A CBT counselor I know has now used AI to do mid-week follow-up with clients: automatically identifying irrational beliefs, reminding them to complete homework, and summarizing weekly mood changes. AI can do these standardized tasks more accurately than humans. He can save 10 hours of repetitive work every week, leaving it for clients who need in-depth communication.

Of course, controversy has never ceased. The two core issues are privacy and professionalism. Last year, it was revealed that an overseas psychological counseling AI platform packaged users’ confession data and sold it to advertisers. Even insomnia and intimacy issues mentioned by users were used to match corresponding product advertisements. ； What's even more outrageous is that a user entered "I don't want to live anymore" on the platform, and the AI ​​only replied "Think more about happy things", which almost caused an accident. Nowadays, mainstream compliance platforms will store the AI ​​consultation corpus in a localized and encrypted manner, and will also set up risk warnings in the AI ​​response logic. As long as high-risk keywords such as self-injury and suicide are identified, manual crisis intervention will be immediately performed in order to plug these loopholes.

I worked on a quarterly project for a week some time ago. When I was lying in bed at 2 a.m. and my mind couldn't stop, I also tried using AI for mindfulness guidance. Don't tell me, it was much easier to use than the audio recordings and broadcasts I had saved before - I interrupted midway and said, "No, I still can't help but think about the unchanged plan." But if I really want to sort out the emotional stuck points related to my family of origin, I will still find a real-life counselor who has been with me for two years. Last time I mentioned that my mother left me at my grandma’s house when I was a child. I suddenly couldn’t continue in the middle of a sentence. She waited for me quietly for five minutes, without rushing me or giving blind advice. This kind of inheritance based on long-term trust and with empathy cannot be scratched by no matter how smart the algorithm is.

In fact, there is really no need to debate the issue of "Can AI replace consultants?" Just like the antipyretics and thermometers at home cannot replace outpatient doctors, but when you have a headache and a fever, you don't immediately go to the hospital and queue for 3 hours to see a cold, right? The same goes for psychological counseling AI. It doesn't need to be a perfect "virtual counselor." As long as it can catch you when you emo late at night and can't find anyone to talk to, when you have a minor emotional problem and you want to sort it out on your own, or when you need a place to record your status during an appointment with a counselor, it has fulfilled its mission.