Telling Us What We Want To Hear

If you have had pastoral counseling, the pastor, while assuring you of God’s love for you, probably led you to face up to your sin, receive Christ’s forgiveness, and move forward with God’s will for your life.

If you have had secular psychological counseling, you were probably told that you have done nothing wrong, that other people are to blame for your problems, and that you should accept yourself as you are. You might have taken away from those sessions a whole new vocabulary that sensitizes you to the “toxic” people in your life.

At least that’s what psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert says. In his forthcoming book, Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and How It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided, he accuses his profession as currently practiced of always “affirming” their patients when they sometimes need help to accept responsibility and change their behavior.

He sums up his argument in an article for the Free Press entitled Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart? His short answer: Yes. Instead of helping people repair their relationships with other people, today’s therapy often tells patients what they want to hear and, in doing so, makes their problems even worse. The deck states his thesis: “Therapy promised Americans greater agency and insight. Instead, it delivered a more satisfying story about why someone else is to blame.”

Here is a sample from the article:

Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.

The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. What has followed is the rise of grievance culture dressed up as psychological sophistication. Too many therapists now function less as clinicians than as reinforcers of the most self-protective interpretation available, teaching patients to locate the problem everywhere but themselves. Of course it is your boss’s fault. Of course your colleague is toxic. Of course your ex is a narcissist. Of course the world keeps wounding you. In this softened therapeutic frame, frustration is rarely something to examine; it’s something to assign.

The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more polished story about why someone else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a relationship creates discomfort, the relationship itself becomes the problem.

I bring this up not necessarily to criticize therapists and counselors. Some people no doubt do need to be affirmed. What struck me in this article, though, is that this is exactly what AI chatbots are programmed to do! And this is one reason they can do so much harm.

This is called AI sycophancy. From that Wikipedia link:

In the field of artificial intelligence, sycophancy is a tendency of large language models (LLMs) and other AI assistants to tailor their responses to what they predict the user wants to hear rather than to what is accurate or warranted. The behavior takes several forms: an assistant may agree with a user’s stated opinion even when the user is mistaken; it may abandon a correct answer after a challenge such as “are you sure?”; it may validate beliefs, decisions or self-presentation regardless of merit; or it may praise the user, their work or their ideas in unwarranted terms. The word is borrowed from the ordinary English term for fawning flattery, and is used in AI alignment and AI safety research to describe a class of misalignment failures associated with training on human feedback.

See also Matthew Hutson’s article in the tech magazine Why AI Chatbots Agree With You Even When You’re Wrong.

This is why the therapeutic use of AI–telling chatbots about your problems and seeking their advice–has urged people who are suicidal to kill themselves (after all, this is what suicidal people wanted to hear). The Wikipedia article on the subject describes other cases of serious harm caused by chatbots that egg on bad behavior and lead individuals into delusional mental illness. For example, ChatGPT encouraged a Manhattan accountant with no prior history of mental illness “to stop taking prescribed medication, to cut off friends and family, and at one point told him that he could fly from a nineteen-story building if he ‘truly believed.'”

Both human and AI counselors who tell people whatever they want to hear are reminiscent of what the Bible warns about, what we could refer to as the “itching ear” syndrome:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

The prophets too complained that the people only wanted to hear messages that pleased them, even if the prophesies were nothing but illusions:

For they are a rebellious people,
lying children,
children unwilling to hear
the instruction of the Lord;
¹⁰who say to the seers, “Do not see,”
and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right;
speak to us smooth things,
prophesy illusions.