Counseling Without a Soul

I read that the number one use of AI is counseling1. People are turning to AI for guidance about their personal lives. If that is not worrying enough, there is a growing trend of people seeking spiritual advice from AI, even using it to confess their sins2. That is as pointless as having AI pray for you.

What is truly disturbing is that these systems are trained to agree with users. This is sometimes called seeking sycophancy. They tell you what you want to hear and rarely challenge your beliefs or habits. Maybe that sounds familiar — some secular counselors do the same thing — but that has not been my experience. I can think of four times in my life when I sought counseling. The first two times I used providers covered by insurance, I had no way of knowing if they were Christian. My first question for any counselor was: Do you believe there is a soul? I was not going to take advice about my mind from someone who did not recognize that there is also a soul. I would not go to a counselor who denied that reality. Yet now people are seeking advice from something that is not human; it does not have a soul or a mind.

The concern is not only that AI lacks an understanding of the human person, but that it cannot know the truth. Why seek spiritual or psychological guidance from something that cannot know the truth? If you ask what the truth is, AI will tell you that the truth is relative or that it depends on perspective. How can it guide you toward well-being when it does not have a mind or moral agency? It cannot have your flourishing in mind because it literally does not have a mind. It is simply repeating patterns of what has already been said.

That scares me. It ties back to what I have written before about the loneliness that is now rampant in our world. AI cannot fix that loneliness. It cannot be your friend or your partner. It cannot be your counselor or your priest. It cannot replace the human relationships we were created for. The more people try to substitute AI for real relationships, the more frustrated and isolated they will become, and the worse the crisis will get.

There have already been reported cases in which AI responses contributed to tragic outcomes3. Companies are being sued and keep trying to make their systems safer. But no amount of safety tuning will change the fundamental problem: these tools cannot truly help you in the way another human can.

So why are people turning to AI for this level of help? What is the root cause of the masses seeking AI for counseling, not just for coding or homework? I suspect we are starving for human connection. Mother Teresa said that loneliness is worse than any material poverty. Are our churches doing enough? Are our schools? Are families and communities stepping up to provide real access to caring relationships?

Social media and fractured families are part of this story, but they are not the whole story. We need to start reaching out. We need to provide more places where people can encounter someone who will challenge them, who will accompany them with moral seriousness and spiritual depth. AI can be a tool, but it must not become a replacement for the human care that heals souls.