AI is being turned to as a replacement for therapy. As a sex therapist who specialises in low libido, I wanted to know - can it actually help with something as nuanced as low sex drive in a marriage?

So I put it to the test. I pretended to be a typical client of mine - a woman in a long-term relationship, struggling with low desire and shame around her turn-ons - and turned to both a trained mental health bot and ChatGPT to see what they got right, what they got wrong, and what most people would never notice was missing.

We look at what the research says about AI's accuracy in sexual & mental health, why feeling understood isn't necessarily the same as actually being understood, and where AI genuinely helps versus where it might make things like low libido and relationship issues worse.

In this episode, we explore:

• What the research reveals about how AI chatbots actually perform on sexual health and therapy scenarios
• The results of my own experiment pretending to be a client struggling with low sex drive and shame around what turns her on
• How AI tends to over-validate, skip the questions a sex therapist would ask, and offer solutions before it knows you
• How AI can sneakily reinforce the very patterns that create low desire and sexual problems in marriage in the first place
• When AI is a useful thought partner for relationship and sex issues, and when it falls short of what real therapy does

Today's studies:

Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots for Providing Sexual Health Information: A Consensus Study Using Real-World Clinical Queries

Published in BMC Public Health in 2025.

A Comparison of Responses from Human Therapists and LLM-Based Chatbots

Published in JMIR Mental Health in 2025.

The Ability of AI Therapy Bots to Set Limits With Distressed Adolescents

Published in JMIR Mental Health in 2025.

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