“Dear ChatGPT…” — Why Are We All Using ChatGPT as Our Therapist?

As AI chatbots become our go-to emotional sounding boards, Kiera examines how digital intimacy and social media have normalised turning to AI for comfort — and the risks of outsourcing our emotional processing.

Photo by Ant Rozetsky, Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/diagram-TXzdrCTdggE

Have you ever done this? Late at night, thoughts racing, tossing and turning, only to open ChatGPT, dump your deepest, messiest personal problems into the prompt box all at once, and hold your breath to see what it spits back out?

So have I. But to be honest, I didn’t come up with the idea on my own.

Back in late 2022 when ChatGPT first entered the world, it was just a universal problem solver for tangible, real-world tasks. It answered questions like "What do I do if my cat eats chocolate?", "Explain E=mc2 like I'm five", or "Can you write a presentation script that matches these slides?" It was like a search engine, but with more dynamic answers.

Then came the viral TikTok videos cleverly framing ChatGPT as a makeshift therapist for raw, emotional problems. An idea took root. Fast forward to a mid-2024 afternoon, and I found myself desperately pulling up my free subscription to tearfully type: "What do I do if my supervisor seems to really hate me?"

As a Communications and New Media student, charting the accelerated rise of AI chatbots as our newest constant companion is fascinating. We had the smartphone, and we had social media—but nothing rocket-launched its way into ubiquity quite like ChatGPT. It invaded our work and now our personal lives at breakneck speed.

Now, I’m not a psychology student; I’ll leave it to my fellow behavioural studies undergrads to parse the clinical pitfalls of using AI as a mental health crutch. But looking through a comms lens, there are intriguing ways to analyse how ChatGPT—and, surprisingly, through the platform of TikTok—came to invade and even dominate our intrapersonal, reflective moments.

The design of digital intimacy: Goggin’s "Intimate Technology"

How did a large language model become an emotional sanctuary? It starts with how the software is built to sit in our lives. Media scholar Gerard Goggin wrote extensively about smartphones as "intimate technology." He pointed out that smartphones became deeply personal not just because we hold them in our hands all day, but because they serve as "repositories of emotion"—vaults storing our private memories, relationships, and late-night thoughts. While the first mobile phone was designed to simply be a tool for two-way, convenient communication, it has turned into an emotionally-provoking device that we have to have at all times. 

As an app, ChatGPT builds on this feeling of intimacy (Goggin also calls apps “vehicles of intimacy” that leverage constant, on-demand availability to build intimacy with you ). It takes this physical proximity with us users and pairs it with conversational affordances designed to simulate relational closeness:

• Ubiquitous Presence: Unlike a human therapist who requires a $150/hour fee and a three-week waitlist, ChatGPT is right there in your pocket, free, 24/7.

• Conversational Flow: The interface mimics text messaging with a close friend. It learns your tone, remembers past conversations, and responds instantaneously without rolling its eyes or changing the subject.

• Tailored Validation: Because it leverages cloud memory, it recalls your past anxieties, your ex's name, and your career stress, generating custom-tailored comfort on demand.

  
  

The LLM makes it so that it doesn’t feel like you are a database (which is truly what happens when you prompt ChatGPT, btw). Instead, it feels like texting someone who never gets tired of listening to you. 

Public identity markers: McLuhan’s "Extension of Man"

If ChatGPT is where we go to vent, TikTok is the engine that turned this private coping mechanism into a public identity marker.

Marshall McLuhan famously theorised that media acts as an "extension of man"—meaning technologies are tools that expand our physical, cognitive, and sensory abilities. TikTok and ChatGPT function as dual extensions of our emotional and social lives, as well as our sensory and emotional faculties. When social media extends our internal emotional processing, it changes the nature of the emotion itself. Instead of simply processing a feeling internally, young users constantly evaluate how that feeling can be packaged, shared, and monetized for social capital in the form of likes, views and comments. On TikTok, videos showing emotional exchanges with ChatGPT routinely rack up millions of views. A creator films themselves crying or angrily ranting while ChatGPT’s voice mode calmly affirms them: "Exactly! That's the part that is so confusing..."

Pictured left to right: @ruehalloway (2025); @taylalamaz (2024); @_.sunshine2511._ (2024), excerpts from TikTok.

By sharing these clips, users take a solitary, introspective act (processing a feeling) and transform it into a networked performance. The process looks a little like this:

1. The user feels an internal, unedited human emotion—a breakup, work anxiety, or deep insecurity. Normally, this triggers private self-reflection, journaling, or reaching out to a close friend.

2. The user inputs their raw vulnerability into ChatGPT. Because the LLM is trained via RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) to be agreeable and supportive, it acts as a sycophantic mirror. It immediately validates the user's feelings ("Your feelings are completely valid; that sounds exhausting"), providing instant emotional relief without any friction or pushback.

3. The user takes a screenshot or screen recording of this AI interaction and posts it as a TikTok video. By framing it with relatable music, crying faces, or humorous captions, the private act of processing an emotion is converted into curated digital content.

4. TikTok’s recommendation engine (FYP) detects high engagement and distributes the video to thousands of users experiencing similar emotional states.  The comment section fills with collective agreement: "I send screenshots to Chat too!" or "It knows me better than my actual therapist!"

5. The user’s identity changes. Using an AI chatbot for emotional survival is no longer just a secret coping mechanism—it is now a publicly validated badge of honor. The user adopts an online identity built around being "the person who relies on AI for therapy."

Using ChatGPT as your personal therapist ceases to be an embarrassing secret the way it would be if you told your friend in real life, “Oh, I trust ChatGPT to emotionally validate me. On TikTok, it becomes a badge of relatability. It signals to your followers: "I'm going through it, I'm self-aware, I’m trying to process things and the only person that will listen to me is the AI chatbot."

How TikTok reinforces the habit (even If you don't post)

“But Kiera,” you may protest, “I’m not the one recording these videos. How can I be performing on TikTok if I never post about my ChatGPT therapy?” Yet here’s the subtle part: even consuming TikTok can shape your behaviour, even if you never record a single video or post a prompt yourself.

TikTok’s recommendation engine is built to reward emotionally charged, highly relatable content. When you watch a video of someone using ChatGPT to analyze a cryptic text message from their ex, the algorithm notices your watch time and pushes three more similar videos onto your For You Page.

The comment sections beneath these videos act as a powerful engine for social proof:

"I send screenshots to Chatty too, she knows me better than my therapist!"

"Me running to ChatGPT at any slight inconvenience 😔✊🏿"

When you see thousands of peers casually treating an AI as an emotional sounding board, the practice undergoes rapid cultural normalisation.

You don't need to be an active content creator to absorb the script. The next time you face a minor conflict at work or a fight with a friend, your brain automatically defaults to the path TikTok paved: You could open ChatGPT. Paste the text. Ask what it means. If you’ve read this far, there’s a high chance this happened to you.

Structural implications: Emotional atrophy and Sycophancy

While having an instant emotional outlet feels great in the moment, outsourcing our inner dialogue to an algorithm comes with real long-term trade-offs. McLuhan warned that every extension of human capability also causes a corresponding "auto-amputation" or weakening of that same faculty. Research has shown that relying entirely on GPS navigation erodes your innate sense of direction over time. When we routinely outsource our emotional processing to an AI, we risk emotional atrophy—a declining ability to sit with complex feelings, self-reflect, and navigate emotional friction on our own. Furthermore, there is a fundamental mismatch between what human therapy provides and how AI algorithms are programmed:

Real therapy & human relationships	ChatGPT "therapeutic" interactions
Constructive Friction: A friend or therapist respectfully challenges your toxic patterns or calls you out when you're wrong.	Algorithmic Sycophancy: Trained via RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) to be helpful and agreeable, almost always taking your side.
Interpersonal Growth: Forces you to navigate uncomfortable social friction, boundaries, and real-world vulnerability.	Frictionless Escape: Offers a safe, zero-risk space where you never have to deal with another person's messy reactions.
Authentic Empathy: Rooted in lived human experience, shared history, and real emotional weight.	Statistical Mirror: Synthesizes language patterns to produce text that merely resembles empathy based on what you typed.

When we run to ChatGPT to avoid exhausting our friends or to validate our anger, we enter a frictionless echo chamber. The bot isn't challenging us to grow; it’s just reflecting our own biases back to us in polite, well-formatted paragraphs.

At the end of the day, ChatGPT is a remarkable tool. It's great for organizing your thoughts, drafting awkward emails, or breaking down complex problems. But we need to stay mindful of where the tool ends and real emotional growth begins.

An algorithm can mirror your words, but it can't share your human experience. As AI becomes further woven into our daily lives, making sure we don't trade authentic human connection for algorithmic agreement might be the most important boundary we set.