AI is coming, but what do I know?

As a mental health counselor for over a decade, I have recently felt a growing fear that becomes more tangible every day. Systems are being designed not just to assist us but to replace significant parts of our work. Many compare the role of AI in counseling to a tool or a means of expanding accessibility for clients, but this perspective misses an essential point. Replacing counselors with AI is akin to the history of lighthouse keepers: first displaced by automated lights and later rendered obsolete when GPS became prevalent.

Change is inevitable, but inevitability does not make every change beneficial.
While AI can identify patterns, it cannot perceive the subtleties of nonverbal cues, the emotional turmoil in a client’s voice, the hesitation in their silences, or the meaning behind what they choose not to say. Automated lighthouses still shone brightly, but they did not care whether sailors lived or died.

When GPS became prevalent, even the symbolic presence of those lights disappeared, leaving behind only nostalgia. The danger for counseling is not that AI will fail, but that the human-to-human connection, the core of therapeutic change, seems as though it will be slowly engineered out until the profession loses what makes it effective, meaningful, and ethically grounded.

Counseling is not merely about vigilance or problem-solving; it is a relationship built on trust, nuance, lived experience, and genuine empathy, not simulated responses that merely enable interaction.
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Just as the last lighthouse keepers understood that their role extended far beyond tending a lamp; counselors, I hope will remain dedicated to their work because it is profoundly human. It is resiliency, dedication, ethics, and fucking empathy that keep people from running aground.

​Thank you for reading,
Chris McGinn
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