AI can mimic emotional language but cannot replicate true clinical empathy.

Deceptive empathy may help people feel listened to but not necessarily understood.

This type of empathy may reassure in the short term but cause harm in the long term.

In my 2023 book, Understanding and Coping with Illness Anxiety, I wrote a section about the problem of using Google to seek reassurance for health-related fears. Little did I know that three years later, those of us with health anxiety would face another, more formidable obstacle in our quest for instantaneous reassurance: generative artificial intelligence. Reassurance-seeking has always gone hand in hand with illness anxiety: Whether it is going to the emergency room, seeking multiple medical opinions, searching symptoms on Google, or talking to Copilot or ChatGPT, this type of anxiety soothing is regularly employed by anxious individuals. But AI has arguably worsened what can be a slippery slope of immediate reassurance-seeking and comes with significant risks.

We must acknowledge the prevalence of AI usage in relation to medical anxiety: Two-thirds of U.S. consumers have used generative AI for health queries, with reassurance cited as one of the primary reasons, along with convenience and cost. Eighty-two percent of individuals surveyed in a recent study feel more listened to by AI than they do by human doctors (74 percent); 27 percent would use AI in the case of a medical emergency; and 3 in 10 would trust AI over a human doctor (Martin, 2026). All this to say that, without due skepticism, AI has become perhaps the primary........

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