2d ago

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill into law on August 1 banning AI use for providing mental health services, while allowing its use in admin roles

idfpr.illinois.gov

Gov Pritzker Signs Legislation Prohibiting AI Therapy in Illinois

2d ago

idfpr.illinois.gov /news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-state-leg-prohibiting-ai-therapy-in-il.html

4 comments

Building on efforts to ensure quality healthcare accessibility for the people of Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation on Friday that protects patients by limiting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in therapy and psychotherapy services.
Poor ELIZA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.
The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient's words to the patient),[9][10][11] and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs.
Decades of emacs having M-x doctor.

M-x doctor I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
Checking git, the initial work on doctor.el appears to precede its initial commit into a version control system in 1991, but the initial copyright message on doctor.el appears to date to 1985.
- I'm curious if that would match the definition in the legislation. It could kind of be argued both ways.
  (M) Artificial Intelligence. "Artificial intelligence" means a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. "Artificial intelligence" includes generative artificial intelligence.
  (N) Generative Artificial Intelligence. "Generative artificial intelligence" means an automated computing system that, when prompted with human prompts, descriptions, or queries, can produce outputs that simulate human-produced content, including, but not limited to, the following: (1) textual outputs, such as short answers, essays, poetry, or longer compositions or answers; (2) image outputs, such as fine art, photographs, conceptual art, diagrams, and other images; (3) multimedia outputs, such as audio or video in the form of compositions, songs, or short-form or long-form audio or video; and (4) other content that would be otherwise produced by human means.
  (Source: P.A. 102-233, eff. 8-2-21; 102-558, eff. 8-20-21; 102-1030, eff. 5-27-22; 103-804, eff. 1-1-26.)
Common JB W.
Protecting unions, not patients.