Forbes January 21, 2026
In today’s column, I examine in-depth the use of AI personas to craft synthetic mental health therapists.
This is readily undertaken via modern-era generative AI and large language models (LLMs). With a few detailed instructions in a prompt, you can readily get AI to pretend to be a therapist. There are lazy ways to do this. There are more robust ways to do so. The key is whether you aim to have a shallow default synthetic version or desire to have a fuller instantiation with greater capacities and perspectives.
The extent of the simulated therapist that you invoke is going to materially impact how the AI acts during any interaction that you opt to use the AI persona for. One...
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