If you’re like me, you’ve read a lot of articles about AI and therapy. Too many. Like, to the point where any variation on the phrase “AI therapy” sends you screaming to, well, your AI therapist. So why on earth, for our sparkly new AI issue, did we let Alex Mar write no fewer than 14,000 words on the subject?
For a few reasons. One is that it’s Alex Mar. She’s brilliant, a wonderful writer. (Several years ago, she wrote an instant masterpiece of a cover story for us, “Love in the Time of Robots.”) Another is that no AI issue, and certainly not one with aspirations to a kind of last-word comprehensiveness, would be complete without something on mental health. Finally, we had an agenda. A lot of writing on AI and mental health is, frankly, terrible. It scapegoats and it fearmongers. We knew Alex could go deeper—and correct the record.
Deep she went. The piece she surfaced with, “The Cure,” has not one but four main characters: two humans, two bots. (Or a lot more than that—one of the humans, who has dissociative identity disorder, ends up creating multiple bots.) The two sides never meet, but their stories bounce off and reflect one another in strange, enlightening, mirror-dimensional ways. Don’t worry if identities and psyches blur, break. AI is a hall of mirrors, almost by definition. New selves loop out of these recursions.
Alex’s piece is, in other words, AI writing as we think it ought to be done. Lives are not, in the end, ruined. They are simply transformed, in ways that might seem unthinkable, until you realize they’re utterly, allowably human.
