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Notes -
I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People and it includes an anecdote in which Abraham Lincoln invited a friend over to talk about a difficult decision he had to make. Lincoln then effectively talked at the friend in question for several hours, with the friend's contributions limited to nodding and motioning to continue. Lincoln then decided what he was going to do. The friend realized that Lincoln had just needed to get his thoughts out in the open, but probably felt silly having no one to direct them to.
(I have no idea whether this anecdote is true or not; I'm paraphrasing Carnegie's account from memory.)
People go to therapy for different reasons. Sometimes they have serious mental illnesses, sometimes they're lonely and the therapist is a parasocial surrogate friend. But sometimes it's a bit more like the Lincoln situation outlined above: the person just needs to get their thoughts off their chest, out loud, so they can better decide what to do with their lives - they don't need, and aren't looking for, advice, guidance or criticism at all. Some therapeutic schools are even explicitly modelled on non-judgementally allowing the client to come to their own conclusions without deliberate intervention.
I can't help but suspect that many therapists feel a little undignified, having studied for years in hopes of helping people in genuine psychic distress, and instead having to sit quietly to be used as a human sounding board by some overpaid PMC laptop worker. If all you're using therapy for is to bounce your thoughts, ideas and grievances off another entity, and the personal qualities and qualifications of that person are almost completely beside the point (aside from "won't nod off while you're talking to them" and "will do an excellent job of feigning interest in the minutiae of your personal life"), why not use an AI, and let the human therapists help the people who actually need help?
In a different context, this is "rubber-duck debugging." Sometimes putting yourself into a context where you need to make the problem concrete by explaining it out loud in detail is enough to track down the error or resolve a conflict of priorities.
Edit: @FCfromSSC beat me to it.
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