The anti-ai retreat for therapists

In case you haven’t been able to tell by now, I have a strong stance against so-called ‘AI.’ This is actually a 180 turn for me from about 2 years ago, when I first stared investigating ways to help me with clinical note-taking. Notes are the bane of my professional existence, as it is for many others.

As I scoured for courses, webinars, articles, formats etc on how to streamline my notetaking process, one thing kept appearing: the ‘AI scribe’. I delved deeper into what the OG scribes actually are and was amazed to learn that it is (or was) an actual person that would sit with a physician and note the details of the appointment, allowing the physician dedicated focus with their patient. Wow! But ooof; if only most of us could afford to hire such a person.

Enter the AI scribe. It seemed that almost every day, a new company would pop up, offering clinicians this amazing new technology that would solve all our notetaking problems, from ‘distilling relevant patient information,’ to reducing the amount of time for actual notetaking, to ‘efficiently integrating with the EHR,’ AI scribes seemed the perfect tool.

Being the sceptic I am, I wondered what the catch was. And, of course, there is one. A big one. My first red flag was the Ontario government formally recommending and aligning with certain AI companies. If you’re left leaning and from Ontario, you’ll know that the current provincial government is all about business and lining corporate pockets to the detriment of everyone else (but that‘s another story and one better described by other folks).

Then I started reading about the clinical ethical issues of using AI, including privacy risks and how personal health data is being managed. This is where things started feeling really off for me. Every single conference, forum, webinar series related to the health fields began introducing AI as a boon, without any critical analysis. ‘Oh, don’t worry, our AI service is perfectly safe,’ the providers quip, without any actual proof. Every discussion was/is actually just a promotional tool. The only ethical issues they consider is the data collection portion, with complete disregard to how AI is actually constructed. I could not find any discussion about ‘the ethics of AI’ that focused on the planetary and human costs. And when I brought it up in forums, the answers were all the same: ‘what a great question!‘ with zero followup. That got exhausting real fast.

So I started reading more and more. Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, about the horrors they create; Sarah Wynne-Williams’ Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism at Facebook/Meta (Meta has, through its multi-billion dollar legal team, effectively stopped Wynne-Williams from talking about her own book); and the scientific research of Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, and Olivia Guest, among many others.

What’s (not so) funny these days is that there is a growing movement to discredit the knowledge of female identified AI researchers and their readers, creating a bizarre smokescreen of ‘women use AI less than men because they don’t understand it‘ (See Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins tell their fans ‘don't get left behind! Give all your financial data to these companies!’). The discreditors don’t want people to know that women use AI less because we fucking know more about what it is and what it does and we actually care about the damage being done. We also know the direct harms of shit like Musk’s ai system being highly focused on creating revenge porn and CSEM. As my husband recently summed up quite succinctly, ‘women read the manual.’

The ‘ethics’ of AI should be more about how medical data is managed. It should consider how much water and energy the data centres use to ‘scale up’ their efforts to – get this – literally become the first company to do… who knows what. They don’t even know what their products are capable of; they just want to be the first ones to do it, whatever it is (if this sounds too bonkers to be true, it’s not, with many reports direct from CEO mouths). Corporations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and DeepSeek are all in a race to destroy the planet for profit. They purposefully seek areas for their data centres that are financially depressed and cannot afford intense court cases against them. They find municipalities willing to hand over their water and energy supplies for a promise of things like jobs that do not materialize. Many data centres are in the global south for this very reason.

Never mind the actual humans that are and will always be part of the AI systems – people like the content moderators that are burdened with watching the most brutal content for hours on end, being paid literal pennies so they can ‘train’ AI. The tech companies will just move to a new moderating region when their current host starts to push back and demand things like – gasp! – a living wage and limited hours.

It is not hyperbole to say that tech companies and AI destroy everything they touch.

So…

After all my research that began with ‘how can a technology help me record my clients’ concerns?’, I am back to where I started – hand writing them in session, and later synthesizing them and typing them into my digital EHR. Yes, it takes the same amount of time as it used to (well; I may be a bit better than I was 2 years ago), and I still have the same frustrations with them, but I can sleep at night, knowing that I have not engaged with an exploitative, extractive industry that only seeks to improve the wealth of a handful of billionaires so they can leave earth behind and seek immortality in space (think I’m still being wild in my assumptions? Nope, that’s a real thing. Read The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence, by computational scientists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres; it’s wild).

If you’re a therapist reading this, you’ll likely have at least a few clients who have mentioned they ask Claude or ChatGPT or WhateverBot how to get through their pain and suffering. And I get it. I get why people who are looking for relief from pain want answers that validate their feelings. Of course they do! We’re all human and no human wants to live a life in pain. Which is a truth that AI companies feed on like vultures.

A still from BladeRunner 2049 that perfectly resembles what Toronto looked like on July 15 2026.

I write this post on Day 2 of an 'Orange Air Quality Warning’ over Toronto, naming us grand prize winner of Worst Air Quality in the World; the skies are literally orange; regions to the north of us are massively on fire; and our Prime Minister can’t/won’t read the room, posting that the country is dedicating billions to the fossil fuel industry and data centres so Canada can be a ‘leader’ in AI.’ I’m tired and literally can’t breathe.

So I’m reminded of a significant reason for creating a retreat for sex therapists, smack in the middle of a lush forest. It’s a chance to unplug, to talk to real humans, and engage with the more-than-human world. To be reminded of just how much nature does for us (and maybe and how little we do for it). To breathe.

Join me? kokoroquebec.ca