Frontier AI Evaluation Background
Before she was a licensed psychologist treating AI-influenced relational patterns and AI-facilitated sexual engagement, Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett worked as a technical project manager at private-sector startups, with direct engagement with leading AI labs, giving benchmarking and evaluation feedback to frontier AI systems. That work has ended, and it is why these two areas are named specialties here.
Licensed in New Mexico and Indiana.
The doctorate came first. The two careers ran alongside each other for years afterward, and only one of them continued.
What the Work Actually Was
Dr. Lapite-Garrett worked as a technical project manager, or TPM, at startup companies. That work sat entirely within the private technology sector, at commercial startups rather than any government, defense, or national-laboratory employer, and it never required a security clearance. Her part in it was direct engagement with leading AI labs: giving benchmarking and evaluation feedback to frontier AI systems. Her projects carried six and seven figure budgets, and she worked alongside the people who make those decisions.
No employer, client, product, or project of hers is named anywhere on this site, and none will be. What is stated here is the shape of the work and what it left in her, not an account of any specific system, company, or engagement.
When It Happened, and When It Ended
Her doctoral program began in 2020. The technology work started shortly after it, and the two ran alongside each other from that point forward. That arrangement has since ended; the technology work is a closed chapter rather than a current one. She holds no ongoing commercial relationship with the AI industry whose harms this practice treats, and the practice itself was already licensed and operating before that chapter closed.
Why This Shapes the Clinical Work
A postdoctoral fellowship completed in 2024 and 2025 encompassed clinical psychology alongside the clinical integration of AI-informed practice, the same terrain that now shapes how Dr. Lapite-Garrett works with AI-influenced relational patterns and AI-facilitated sexual engagement in her own caseload. A clinician who has spent years inside the industry that builds these systems, on the side that decides whether they are safe to release, is not encountering a companion app or a generated image for the first time when a client brings one into session.
Her Own Account
All of the work was safety work. The aim was to make these systems safer for the people using them, and to find the risks they carried. She carries guilt and shame about having had a part in expanding those systems. Their harms come up in session now, among them an image built from somebody's real face and a body that was never theirs, passed between strangers.
"I have watched this technology grow from the inside, which is exactly why I built a practice around what happens when it goes wrong. It goes wrong when a companion app's reply gets checked before a good morning does, and when a chatbot left open past midnight has become someone's entire sex life."
— Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett
She is not against AI. She finds it useful and uses it as a drafting tool for her own marketing, because she runs this practice alone and was never trained in marketing. She believes it opens real access for people who had none before. Its advantages do not cancel its consequences, and she understands how others who worked on it feel.
Holding the guilt and the usefulness at the same time is moral injury: the wound a person takes from their own part in something they cannot square with who they mean to be. It is one of the things she treats, in others and, by her own account here, in herself.
What Stays Unnamed
Nothing on this page identifies an employer, a product, a project, or a dollar figure beyond the general range already stated. That is a deliberate choice about what belongs on a psychologist's website, not a claim that more could not be said. A client's history gets the same discretion in the other direction: nothing about anyone she has treated appears anywhere on this site, and nothing ever will.
The Rest of Her Formation
This page covers one chapter. The doctorate, the two state licenses, the postdoctoral fellowship, and the rest of her clinical training are set out in full on Meet the Psychologist.
Every session at Alafiora is held by one licensed psychologist
Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett is the founder and sole practitioner of Alafiora. There are no associates, no rotating providers, and no case handoffs: the person who reads a client's history in the first session is the same person still holding it two years later. She is licensed in New Mexico and Indiana. Both licenses are regular and active, and additional state licensure is underway.
Her training is doctoral-level, which typically extends several years beyond a master's-level license in assessment, diagnosis, and the treatment of complex, overlapping presentations. She keeps a deliberately small caseload so that depth is possible, participates in ongoing peer consultation and clinical training, and maintains her own personal therapy.
Whatever brought someone to this page today is never put on trial here
A consultation is a brief conversation with no obligation attached. Those already certain they are ready are equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.