Yes, Therapy Sessions Are Being Used to Train AI
About this article
There's a political fight over the practice of therapy, spurred by AI. As Wall Street driven health platforms try to reorder mental health care, therapists are pushing for regulation of insurance.
Yes, Therapy Sessions Are Being Used to Train AIThere's a political fight over the practice of therapy, spurred by AI. As Wall Street driven health platforms try to reorder mental health care, therapists are pushing for regulation of insurance.Matt StollerApr 04, 20261821224ShareOver the past couple of weeks, I’ve gotten outreach from a few therapists who told me how corporate middlemen are entering the profession as “platforms.” And part of what they are doing is encouraging the recording of therapy sessions to potentially train artificial intelligence models. So I looked into it, and sure enough it’s happening. But how it’s happening, and why it’s happening, is only partly a technology story. It is more a story of how Wall Street is attempting to reorganize what has traditionally been an independent therapy profession, albeit one that never offered its services to all those in need. There is also pushback; states are starting to pass some laws that block financialization and widen access. Let’s start with what’s happening on the AI front, with some attempts to just replace therapists. Millions of people general purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT for mental health support-like functions, despite significant problems. There is something called Therabot, developed by Dartmouth researchers. And Talkspace is reportedly focused on building an LLM with its “140 million anonymized patient-provider messages, 6.2 million completed psychological assessments, 1.2 million therapist dia...