ChatGPT is replacing human psychotherapists

A senior OpenAI employee opened a veritable can of worms this week when she claimed that the latest version of ChatGPT, which now has voice recognition capabilities, is akin to talking with a human therapist. "Just had a quite emotional, personal conversation [with] ChatGPT in voice mode, talking about stress [and] work-life balance," Lilian Weng, OpenAI's head of safety systems, posted on the site formerly known as Twitter, adding that she felt "heard" and "warm" following the conversation. AI therapists have experienced something of a renaissance over the past decade. In 2015, researchers at the University of Southern California released "Ellie," a chatbot with a virtual humanoid avatar that was trained to detect facial expressions and, purportedly, tell how the humans it interacted with were feeling.