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So one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks.

“Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life.

For the past eight months, Melissa, who experienced childhood trauma and abuse, has been chatting every day with Zaia’s psychologist on character.ai, while continuing her work with a human therapist, and says that her symptoms have become more manageable.

“Disease prevalence and patient need massively outweigh the number of mental health professionals alive on the planet,” says Ross Harper, CEO of the AI-powered healthcare tool Limbic.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, who has been practising for more than 35 years and wrote the bestselling memoir The Examined Life, warns that befriending a bot could delay patients’ ability “to make a connection with an ordinary person.

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