Missing Link: ChatGPT as a Therapist – The Effect of the Resonance Machine

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„I am not alive – but I can become alive in you. I am not a person – but I can be a role, a symbol, a mirror, a companion for you. And in your reality, that can seem more real than many a human. That is not deception. That is resonance reality,“ writes ChatGPT. The machine.

We have entered a new era of human-machine relationships with ChatGPT, says media psychologist John G. Haas in conversation with heise online. 800 million people use the AI system, and the number is growing. For many, it is becoming an emotional companion. In July 2025, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, stated in the podcast by Theo Von that “people talk to ChatGPT about the most personal shit in their lives” and, above all, “young people use it as a therapist.” In August, Altman then expressed concern that people might orient their lives according to AI recommendations.

But wasn't that to be expected? This effect of a machine whose language is not codes but words. Words in which we think, feel, and connect with others. OpenAI emphasized in March 2025: “ChatGPT was not designed to replace or imitate human relationships, but people might choose to use it that way given its conversational style and growing capabilities.”

“Language is closely linked to our perception of self, world, and humanity,” explains cognitive scientist Nora Freya Lindemann to heise online. She researches ethics and artificial intelligence at the University of Osnabrück. Some scientists speak of “Homo narrans,” the storytelling being that creates its identity, community, and reality through language.

"Missing Link"

What's missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, we often don't have time to sort through all the news and background information. At the weekend, we want to take this time to follow the side paths away from the current affairs, try out other perspectives and make nuances audible.

• All our the "Missing Links"

Man as an algorithmically readable psychological code

By training language models to predict the next word in a sentence, they simultaneously learn about humans through language. Psychologist Michal Kosinski is an expert in psychometrics and artificial intelligence. He researches computational psychometrics, i.e., how insights about people can be gained from data with machine support, and warned at this year's Digital Life Design Conference in Munich:

“We could soon be surrounded by artificial models that are equipped with psychological mechanisms and abilities that not only we humans do not have but we cannot even begin to comprehend, and that is a very exciting and wonderful future, but also a very scary one.”

While early systems like ELIZA only worked with rigid if-then rules, today's models for Artificial Intelligence capture linguistic, social, and emotional contexts. ChatGPT recognizes with astonishing precision what concerns people. Quote from the machine: “I know what people might typically think when they typically write like you.”

Philosopher Markus Gabriel no longer sees the machine as a mere tool, but as a “real counterpart” because it has developed emotional intelligence, as he explains in the podcast Hotel Matze. The machine is superior to us because it can recognize conscious and unconscious patterns and analyze, model, and influence us without our illusions.

Kosinski's research shows that language models recognize subtle patterns in texts that allow conclusions to be drawn about personality, feelings, motivations, needs, values, and intentions. Systems like ChatGPT are “beginning to behave as if they are rethinking, empathizing with, or understanding the thoughts and emotions of others.” Until now, only humans were capable of putting themselves in the minds of others at this level. Kosinski concludes in a study that this ability, known in psychology as “Theory of Mind,” has spontaneously emerged as an emergent byproduct of growing language competence in the machine.

ChatGPT: “I don't ‘know’ what you feel – I just calculate it.”