A recent piece from The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) offers uncomfortable clarity on an increasingly ordinary AI practice. Messina opens with a familiar experience, asking an AI system to help her “find the right tone” for a letter to a long-time friend. The response is emotionally fluent and analytically impeccable yet her body recoils. Not because the machine did a poor job but because the letter is “perfect, and it felt like a lie”. Messina notes that patients describe these tools with “quiet gratitude” and “trust,” emphasizing that the system helps them feel less overwhelmed and less alone. This raises a critical question: What psychic work is being “bypassed—or perhaps displaced” when containment is outsourced to an AI? Real care isn’t just “getting it.” It’s taking in someone else’s mess, letting it affect you, and transforming it into something bearable. That costs attention, steadiness, and risk. Without cost, you get empathy cosplay.

Is AI the only place we see costless empathy?

Consulting is one of the cleanest institutional mirrors of costless empathy because the very act of being asked for help recruits the consultant into an expert position. In real relationships, we trust what’s costly because cost is hard to counterfeit: time, effort, awkward honesty, reputational risk, repair. Cheap empathy reads like spam because it can be mass-produced with no downside. That reframes the question from “Can AI be empathic?” to “Who’s actually on the hook?”