Is Your AI Therapist a Mole for the Surveillance State?

“It’s Delusional Not to be Paranoid”

​With few exceptions, conversations with mental health professionals are protected as privileged (and therefore private) communication.
 
Unless your therapist is a chatbot. In that case, conversations are no more sacrosanct than a web search or any other AI chat log; with a warrant, law enforcement can access them for specific investigations. And of course, agencies like the NSA don’t even feel compelled to bother with the warrant part.
 
And if you think you’re protected by encryption, think again says Adi Robertson in The Verge. Chatting with friends using encrypted apps is one thing. Chatting with an AI on a major platform doesn’t protect you from algorithms that are designed to alert the company to sensitive topics.
 
In the current age of endless fascination with AI, asks Robertson, what would prevent any government agency from redefining what constitutes “sensitive” based on politics alone? Broach the wrong topics with your chatbot therapist and you might discover that someone has leaked your conversation to social media for public shaming. Or perhaps a 4 a.m. knock on the door with a battering ram by the FBI.
 
Chatbots aren’t truly private any more than email is. Recall the conventional wisdom from the 1990s that advised people to think of electronic communication as the equivalent of a postcard. If you wouldn’t want to write something on a postcard for fear of it being discovered, then it shouldn’t go in an email – or in this case, a chat. We would all do well to heed Adi Robertson’s admonition that when it comes to privacy, we have an alarming level of learned helplessness.
 
“The private and personal nature of chatbots makes them a massive, emerging privacy threat … At a certain point, it’s delusional not to be paranoid.”
 
But there’s another key difference between AI therapists and carbon-based ones: AI therapists aren’t real. They are merely a way for profit-driven companies to learn more about us. Yes, Virginia, they’re in it for the money. To quote Zuckerberg himself, “As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling.” And anyone who thinks compelling isn’t code for profitable in that sentence should consider getting a therapist.
 
A real one.

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