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Good morning.
The data for this piece stopped me cold. I run a newsletter about practical AI use, and I had assumed the top use cases were writing and research. Turns out the thing people do most with AI is talk about what's bothering them. That finding is worth paying attention to — and so is what comes right after it.
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AI INSIGHT
AI is Now Therapy for Millions of People.
It's 11:15 pm. The house is quiet. You have something from that afternoon's phone call still sitting in the back of your head, and everyone else is asleep. You don't want to wake them. Again.
So you open ChatGPT and start typing. The confusion. The repeated questions. The slow-arriving awareness that this isn't just forgetfulness.
The AI asks a follow-up question. You keep typing.
What Richard was doing isn't unusual anymore. According to a Harvard Business Review study published in April 2025, therapy and companionship is now the number one use case for generative AI. Not writing. Not coding. Not research. The top thing people do with AI is talk about what's bothering them.
A year earlier, it ranked second. The shift was fast.
The broader category of personal and emotional support now accounts for 31% of all AI usage, nearly doubling the 17% it represented in 2024. This is not a niche behavior. The research was drawn from forum posts and real-world usage data across adults of every age group.
There are three reasons this is happening:
It's available. AI is there at 11:15 pm on a Tuesday, when everyone else is asleep or exhausted from hearing about it.
It's free. A therapy appointment runs $150 or more. AI is free or close to it.
It doesn't judge. Research published in the APA journal Practice Innovations found that fear of judgment ranked as the single biggest barrier to seeking traditional mental health support, ahead of cost or wait times.
Put those three together and the shift makes sense. People are not replacing therapy. They are filling gaps that therapy was never available to fill in the first place.
A fair amount of what's happening here is genuinely useful. Using AI to process a hard day, rehearse a difficult conversation, or simply organize your own thinking out loud is a legitimate sounding board function. The same research found that 63% of people said AI improved their mental health. That is not nothing.
If you want to try this yourself, our piece on Journaling for Skeptics covers the same basic idea: structured reflection without performing your feelings for an audience. AI just makes it conversational.
Here is where I want to be straight with you, though.
Anthropic's own study of 81,000 people found something striking: people who value emotional support from AI are three times more likely to also fear becoming dependent on it. That was the strongest co-occurrence of any benefit-harm pair in the entire study. The same people doing this are the most aware that the line exists.
That matters because the line is real. A sounding board that helps you organize your thoughts and process something difficult is different from a substitute for human connection or professional care. AI is reasonably good at the first. It cannot do the second. It has no memory of you between conversations, no real stake in your life, and no ability to call you when you go quiet.
There is also the question of what you are not doing while you are talking to AI. If it is replacing a call that needs to happen, a relationship that needs tending, or professional help you have been putting off, the math changes.
The useful version looks like this: typing it out at 11:15 pm, getting clearer on what you actually think, then making the call in the morning. Not instead of it.
Want to try this yourself?
"I need to think through something that's been weighing on me. I don't need advice right away. I just need to talk it through. Ask me one question at a time and help me get clearer on what I'm actually feeling and what, if anything, I want to do about it."
READER POLL
How do you use AI when something's weighing on you?
WHERE TO GO NEXT
More on this topic, from sources worth your time:
The Best Listener You've Never Paid For — Our piece on what AI actually does well when you need to talk something through, and how to use it without expecting more than it can deliver.
Does AI Actually Have a Heart? — A closer look at AI's emotional intelligence and what it can and cannot genuinely offer in a personal conversation.
AI Chatbots and Digital Companions Are Reshaping Emotional Connection (APA Monitor) — APA's honest look at where this is heading, including what the research says about loneliness, dependency risk, and what psychologists are seeing in their practices.
FROM OUR PARTNER
Full disclosure: I use Wispr Flow every day when I'm talking to AI myself, so this one comes from personal experience.
ChatGPT gives you generic answers because you give it generic prompts.
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