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<\/a><\/p>\nIf you have had pastoral counseling, the pastor, while assuring you of God\u2019s love for you, probably led you to face up to your sin, receive Christ\u2019s forgiveness, and move forward with God\u2019s will for your life.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 You might have taken away from those sessions a whole new vocabulary that sensitizes you to the \u201ctoxic\u201d people in your life.<\/p>\n
At least that\u2019s what psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert says.\u00a0 In his\u00a0forthcoming book, Therapy Nation:\u00a0 How America Got Hooked on Therapy and How It\u2019s Left Us More Anxious and Divided<\/a>, he accuses his profession as currently practiced of always \u201caffirming\u201d their patients when they sometimes need help to accept responsibility and change their behavior.<\/p>\n He sums up his argument in an article for the Free Press<\/em> entitled Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?<\/a>\u00a0 His short answer:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Instead of helping people repair their relationships with other people, today\u2019s therapy often tells patients what they want to hear and, in doing so, makes their problems even worse.\u00a0 The deck states his thesis:\u00a0 \u201cTherapy promised Americans greater agency and insight. Instead, it delivered a more satisfying story about why someone else is to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n Here is a sample from the article:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0Of course it is your boss\u2019s fault. Of course your colleague is toxic. Of course your ex is a narcissist. Of course the world keeps wounding you.<\/em>\u00a0In this softened therapeutic frame, frustration is rarely something to examine; it\u2019s something to assign.<\/p>\n The patient doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I bring this up not necessarily to criticize therapists and counselors.\u00a0 Some people no doubt do need to be affirmed.\u00a0 What struck me in this article, though, is that this is exactly what AI chatbots are programmed to do!\u00a0 And this is one reason they can do so much harm.<\/em><\/p>\n This is called AI sycophancy<\/a>.\u00a0 From that Wikipedia link:<\/p>\n In the field of\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>,\u00a0sycophancy<\/b>\u00a0is a tendency of\u00a0large language models<\/a>\u00a0(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.<\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0The behavior takes several forms: an assistant may agree with a user\u2019s stated opinion even when the user is mistaken; it may abandon a correct answer after a challenge such as \u201care you sure?\u201d; 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.<\/sup>\u00a0The word is borrowed from the ordinary English term for fawning flattery, and is used in\u00a0AI alignment<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0AI safety<\/a>\u00a0research to describe a class of misalignment failures associated with training on human feedback.<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n See also Matthew Hutson\u2019s article in the tech magazine Why AI Chatbots Agree With You Even When You\u2019re Wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is why the therapeutic use of AI\u2013telling chatbots about your problems and seeking their advice\u2013has urged people who are suicidal to kill themselves (after all, this is what suicidal people wanted to hear).\u00a0 The Wikipedia article<\/a> on the subject describes other cases of serious harm caused by chatbots that egg on bad behavior and lead individuals into delusional mental illness.\u00a0 For example, ChatGPT encouraged a Manhattan accountant with no prior history of mental illness \u201cto 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 \u2018truly believed.'\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201citching ear\u201d syndrome:<\/p>\n For they are a rebellious people,<\/span> \u00a0<\/p>\n Illustration: Psychosocial Recovery Counseling<\/a> via Quality Care Network: Personalized NDIS Support Coordination, CC BY-NC 4.0<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A psychotherapist criticizes his profession for its current practice of always “validating” patients by telling them what they want to hear. This is exactly what AI chatbots are programmed to do, a “sycophancy” that eggs on suicide and delusions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":91838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,44],"tags":[18557,4129,18560,2538],"class_list":["post-91595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-technology","tag-ai-sycophancy","tag-pastoral-counseling","tag-psychological-validation","tag-therapy"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nlying children,<\/span><\/span>
\nchildren unwilling to hear<\/span>
\nthe instruction of the\u00a0Lord<\/span>;<\/span><\/span>
\n10\u00a0<\/sup>who say to\u00a0the seers, \u201cDo not see,\u201d<\/span>
\nand to the prophets, \u201cDo not prophesy to us what is right;<\/span><\/span>
\nspeak to us\u00a0smooth things,<\/span>
\nprophesy illusions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n