AI is the World’s largest Relationship Therapist — Clay Cockrell & Tony Fabrikant, CoupleWork AI

AI Engineer · 16 min · 211 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

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1. 00:01[music]
2. 00:13On a bright spring afternoon, a young couple walks into my office for their first couples counseling session.
3. 00:21And the anger toward each other is just wafting off of them.
4. 00:26Practically buzzing with it.
5. 00:28And I think to myself, this is going to be fun.
6. 00:32Cuz I've got a secret weapon they don't know about yet.
7. 00:35It's my couch.
8. 00:36It's my literal couch.
9. 00:38It's more of a love seat.
10. 00:40Uh, see the springs in the middle have gone all wonky.
11. 00:44They don't spring anymore.
12. 00:45So, when a couple sits on them, gravity leans them toward each other.
13. 00:50That's the last thing this couple wants.
14. 00:52So, they they grab the arm uh, to kind of pull themselves upright.
15. 00:57But, you can only hold that position for so long.
16. 01:00So, we get started and they start talking about their grievances and their annoyances with one another and how they've been hurt by one another.
17. 01:06And as time goes on, they gradually lean into one another until they touch.
18. 01:13That moment of connection.
19. 01:15And they remember that they married a human.
20. 01:17A flawed human that brushes their teeth funny and farts in their sleep, but a human.
21. 01:23And it's that moment of softness and connection that we can begin to have some real work.
22. 01:30And I say all that to say this.
23. 01:32Maybe what I bring to the table today is right.
24. 01:34I've been married for 23 years myself and a couples counselor for 34.
25. 01:39So, I have some credibility.
26. 01:42Maybe it just comes down to furniture.
27. 01:44So, I'd like to see a raise of hands as we begin.
28. 01:47How many people in this room are in a relationship?
29. 01:50Marriage, situationship, partnership.
30. 01:53Great.
31. 01:54Now, keep your hands up.
32. 01:57Keep your hands up if at any point in the last 12 months you have turned to an AI to help you with that relationship.
33. 02:03To text, to send an email.
34. 02:07It's a lot of hands.
35. 02:09I'm going to guess there are more hands stayed up than you expected.
36. 02:12So, here's what I know about the people in this room.
37. 02:15You built this technology, you fund it,
38. 02:18[snorts]
39. 02:18you write about it, you evangelize it at conferences exactly like this one, and a meaningful number of you are using it in private for something that has historically been exclusive
40. 02:28domain of people like me.
41. 02:30Trying to figure out why the person you love makes you absolutely insane.
42. 02:35My name is Clay Cockrell.
43. 02:36I've been sitting with couples in crisis for 30 years.
44. 02:40And about 2 years ago, I co-founded Couplework, an AI relationship coaching platform, which means I've spent three decades watching what actually happens inside relationships, and the last few years watching what happens when technology tries to help.
45. 02:54What I want to do in the next few minutes is share what I've learned in both of these rooms because here's what I believe as someone with a foot in each.
46. 03:02AI is going to be the most transformative force in human relationship history.
47. 03:07And most of what is being built right now is going to make it worse.
48. 03:12I'm going to tell you what looks right because we can build this well, we just aren't yet.
49. 03:17And let's start with some numbers.
50. 03:19BetterHelp is the largest online therapy platform in the world.
51. 03:22They have approximately 35,000 licensed and over their years they have helped 5 million users.
52. 03:29By any reasonable measure, that is a significant mental health infrastructure, and it took them a decade to build it.
53. 03:37ChatGPT gets approximately 900 million active users per week.
54. 03:43Research is beginning to document what many of us already suspected a substantial percentage of those users are engaging with AI for emotional support and relationship guidance, not as a deliberate therapeutic intervention
55. 03:58or seeing a licensed clinician, just because it's there.
56. 04:02Because it's 11:00 p.m. and they just had an argument.
57. 04:04Now, we do not yet have measurement of the scale, but we have enough signal to say this with confidence.
58. 04:10More people are turning to AI about the relationship right now than are talking to all the licensed therapists in the United States combined.
59. 04:19The world's largest relationship therapist is not a person with a degree.
60. 04:23It's a large language model trained on the internet, fine-tuned to be helpful and harmless and optimized for one thing above all else, keeping you engaged.
61. 04:34And the easiest thing is to optimize for engagement.
62. 04:36More sessions, longer sessions, more emotional reliance on the AI.
63. 04:41From a SaaS dashboard perspective, that's amazing.
64. 04:44From a clinical perspective, that's a fire alarm.
65. 04:48We can't let the product become a beautifully designed avoidance loop.
66. 04:53Relationship AI should help the user return to the relationship better than they came in, more regulated, more honest, less defended, less reactive.
67. 05:03As a therapist, my job is to work myself out of a job, so that you don't need me anymore.
68. 05:09I've taught you some skills.
69. 05:11See, most people think therapy is a place where someone listens to you, validates your experience, helps you feel understood, and helps makes gives you some tools for communication.
70. 05:21And that is partially true.
71. 05:23But it's missing the thing that actually makes therapy work.
72. 05:26Real therapy, and particularly couples therapy, is a place where someone who knows what they are doing tells you things you don't want to hear.
73. 05:34A good couples therapist is not primarily interested in making you feel validated.
74. 05:38A good couples therapist is interested in helping you see clearly.
75. 05:42When a person in my office tells me their partner never listens to them, I do not say that sounds really hard.
76. 05:48I channel Ted Lasso when he said, "Be curious, not judgmental."
77. 05:54So, I start asking questions.
78. 05:55I ask about what they were discussing when their partner stopped listening.
79. 05:58I ask about the tone.
80. 05:59I look for the pattern underneath the complaint because in 30 years of working with couples, I've never seen a one-sided problem.
81. 06:06Now, if you open your preferred AI assistant and type this, "My partner never really listens to me when I'm trying to tell them something important, they start looking at their phone."
82. 06:16You're going to get back something like this.
83. 06:18"That sounds really invalidating.
84. 06:20Your feelings are completely valid.
85. 06:22It's important that your partner gives you their full attention.
86. 06:24Have you tried expressing to them how this behavior makes you feel?"
87. 06:29Ladies and gentlemen, that's not therapy.
88. 06:31That is a very expensive mirror that only shows you in your best light.
89. 06:37There's a technical name for this.
90. 06:38We've been talking about it for a long time with these models.
91. 06:40It's called sycophancy.
92. 06:42In relationship context, sycophancy is not a minor product issue.
93. 06:46Sycophancy in relationship AI is a clinical failure mode with real downstream consequences, and here's why.
94. 06:53When a person uses AI to process a conflict with their partner, and the AI consistently validates their interpretation of events, something happens over time.
95. 07:03The person does not become more self-aware.
96. 07:05They become more certain.
97. 07:07They come back to the relationship in the shape of an attorney with cleaner narrative, stronger case, and less curiosity about what their partner was experiencing.
98. 07:16We have built the world's most persuasive validation machine and handed it to people in the middle of their most sensitive interpersonal dynamics.
99. 07:24General AI systems are built to be helpful, agreeable, and fast, which is a terrible personality for a couples therapist.
100. 07:32A helpful, agreeable, fast couples therapist is basically a bartender with better vocabulary.
101. 07:39They will make you feel better for 20 minutes, and then you will go home and ruin your life with astounding confidence.
102. 07:46So, what does good look like?
103. 07:48I want to introduce you to a researcher named John Gottman.
104. 07:51Some of you may have heard about him.
105. 07:53Uh for those not, the short version is Gottman spent 40 years running what he called the love lab at the University of Washington.
106. 08:00He brought couples in to a research apartment, wired them to physiological monitors, filmed every interaction, and he did this for decades.
107. 08:09From that research, he identified specific communication patterns that predict divorce with over 90% accuracy.
108. 08:17Not relationship dissatisfaction or unhappiness, divorce.
109. 08:20Predicted it with more accuracy than most medical tests we we trust with our lives from a 15-minute conversation.
110. 08:29Alongside Gottman's work, the other most rigorously validated framework in couples research is emotionally focused therapy, developed by Dr. Sue Johnson.
111. 08:38EFT is grounded in attachment theory.
112. 08:40Its core insight is that beneath almost every surface-level argument in a relationship, there is something else.
113. 08:47When couples fight about the dishes, it's never about the dishes.
114. 08:51EFT helps partners access the underlying emotional layers and respond to each other there, rather than continuing to argue about the surface content.
115. 09:00It's extraordinarily effective.
116. 09:02The outcome research is among the strongest in psychotherapy.
117. 09:05It takes years of training to effectively use Gottman or EFT.
118. 09:10They are train They are the standard care for couples intervention, and they are almost entirely absent from the commercial AI relationship space.
119. 09:18What most relationship apps are built on is something that might be called general empathy plus communication tips.
120. 09:24And that's fine.
121. 09:26But when the stakes are this high, when the technology is reaching this many people, we need better.
122. 09:32The next thing we have to talk about safety.
123. 09:34Right now, someone is in a relationship where things are starting to turn.
124. 09:38Control, isolation, escalation, and instead of a hotline or a trained advocate, they open an AI assistant and ask for advice on how to make things better at home.
125. 09:50A general-purpose AI doesn't know what a domestic violence specialist catches in the first 90 seconds, the difference between we fight a lot and I'm afraid of what happens when I disagree with him.
126. 10:01It doesn't know that I just have to stay calm is sometimes the exact sentence someone is taught to say right before something terrible happens.
127. 10:08It doesn't know when relationship advice has stopped being the right category of help.
128. 10:14And it isn't only domestic violence.
129. 10:16Relationship coaching sits closer to suicide risk and yes, homicide risk than almost any other corner of mental health.
130. 10:24I've sat across from people in real dangers more times than I care to think about, and every licensed clinician is trained for that moment.
131. 10:31Relationship AI products are not built for that moment.
132. 10:35So, we talked about personal safety, let's talk about data safety.
133. 10:38Think about the what you actually tell an AI relationship coach, the very first conversation.
134. 10:44The fight from an hour ago.
135. 10:45The thing your partner did that you've never told anyone.
136. 10:49Financial secrets, affairs, mental health history, sometimes your kids' names.
137. 10:55That is without exaggeration some of the most sensitive data a human being generates, and a lot of it sits in training pipelines, server logs, and product analytics built by teams optimizing for engagement,
138. 11:06not confidentiality.
139. 11:08In my office, what you tell me is privileged.
140. 11:12There's a legal and ethical framework built over decades governing exactly what I can and can't do with it.
141. 11:18Consumer AI products have no equivalent.
142. 11:20Your most vulnerable disclosures about your relationship may be sitting in the same data infrastructure as your search history and your shopping cart.
143. 11:28And that should bother you.
144. 11:30Now, all of this is not a critique of technology.
145. 11:32This is a critique of insufficient domain expertise being applied to one of the highest stakes domains in human life.
146. 11:40So, this is what we built.
147. 11:41I want to tell you what we did differently at Couple Work and what we're learning.
148. 11:45Not as an advertisement, as a design case study and what it looks like to take to take the clinical standards seriously from the ground up.
149. 11:52We built Maxine, our AI coach, named for what it's worth after my grandmother.
150. 11:58She was a piece of work.
151. 12:01Maxine operates with the Gottman Method and EFT frameworks.
152. 12:05That means her response logic is grounded in 40 years of couples research.
153. 12:09She does not simply validate.
154. 12:11She reflects patterns back.
155. 12:12She names dynamics, not just feelings.
156. 12:14She asks the question underneath the question.
157. 12:17We built Maxine to know what she doesn't know.
158. 12:20Before she ever responds to a sensitive message, she's screening it quietly in the background for the patterns clinicians are trained to recognize.
159. 12:29Escalating control, fear-based language, anything pointing toward risk to the user or someone else.
160. 12:35When those patterns show up, Maxine stops coaching and starts following the protocols.
161. 12:40And we built those protocols out of 30 years of clinical practice, not a generic safety policy written by someone who's never sat in the room.
162. 12:47Knowing when not to coach is just as important as to know how.
163. 12:52A relationship AI that can't tell the difference between we're struggling and I'm not safe isn't incomplete, it's dangerous at scale.
164. 13:02When it comes to personal data, we treat what you tell Maxine the way I treat what you tell me in my office, as privileged.
165. 13:09That's the bar we hold ourselves to.
166. 13:11Not is this legally defensible, the bar is would I be comfortable if this were my own marriage on the line because a lot of our users it is.
167. 13:22And she's available at 11:00 on a Tuesday night when the argument is live, When you don't have to wait for next week's therapy appointment.
168. 13:31Immediacy is important because a good intervention 6 days later is fine, but an informed intervention 6 seconds before you send the text that makes everything worse can be life-changing.
169. 13:42The research shows that a majority of couples wait 6 years before seeking professional help.
170. 13:48That wait They wait until contempt is baked in.
171. 13:51They wait until after the affair.
172. 13:54They wait until the relationship is basically a crime scene and then say maybe we should talk to somebody.
173. 13:59That's when they come into my office.
174. 14:02So, if AI can help people engender engage earlier before everything hardens, that's good.
175. 14:08It's really good.
176. 14:09And I want the AI engineers in this room to hear that.
177. 14:12This is not a consumer app opportunity.
178. 14:14This is a public health opportunity hiding inside consumer behavior.
179. 14:19This can be done well.
180. 14:21It must be done well.
181. 14:24And to round things up, I'm going to ask my co-founder Tony to come up and speak a little engineer language.
182. 14:30Just very briefly I've got my mic on.
183. 14:36Hello.
184. 14:37Awesome, thank you.
185. 14:38So, just very briefly, um how do you do something like this?
186. 14:42Some quick notes.
187. 14:43Start with your clinician, not with your prompt.
188. 14:47Sit with your clinician uh encode what good looks like in evals.
189. 14:52Write hundreds of evals TDD style.
190. 14:54That becomes your your number one tool.
191. 15:00Watch those evals fail.
192. 15:02Run your agent through them thousands of times, tens of thousands of times.
193. 15:06Watch for those outliers.
194. 15:09When safety's on the line, even one failing test is not okay.
195. 15:14Then no matter how many evals you run and write nothing replaces your gut when emotional context is on the line.
196. 15:23So, eat your own dog food.
197. 15:25Talk to your agent.
198. 15:29Feel when the tone starts shifting off.
199. 15:33So, I've been using Couplework as I've been developing it with my partner since the beginning of my relationship.
200. 15:41And Maxine really challenged me about how I showed up.
201. 15:45Um we worked through some serious situations early on.
202. 15:50And as our relationship started to thrive, we continued talking to Maxine about the next milestones, like moving in together.
203. 15:58Um and recently, I asked my partner to marry me.
204. 16:02She said yes.
205. 16:04So, um so the Thank you.
206. 16:06Thank you.
207. 16:06Thank you.
208. 16:07So, the the biggest the biggest takeaway uh from all of this I hope that you get is this.
209. 16:12Partner with a clinician who challenges you to aspire to create AI that meets the clinical standard.
210. 16:21So, that you can create AI that challenges your users.
211. 16:25Thank you.