Perceived humanness and empathy are dissociated in relationship advice generated by a large language model

Differentiating generated and human-written content is increasingly difficult. We examine how incentives to convey humanness and task characteristics shape perceptions of textual content across five studies. In Studies 1–2, humans and GPT-4 write relationship advice or relationship descriptions with or without instructions to appear human.

New participants judge each text’s source. Instructions to appear human increase perceived humanness only for GPT-4, reducing the human advantage. Study 3 shows that these effects persist under instructions to avoid sounding like an AI model and replicate across GPT-4 and GPT-4o.

Study 4 demonstrates that GPT models can produce empathy without humanness and humanness without empathy. Study 5 shows that GPT-4 increases perceived humanness by adopting informal, conversational language and other surface-level stylistic cues, whereas human writers show little adjustment. Together, the findings indicate that perceived humanness depends on incentives to appear human and the context in which writing is produced.

Tilburg University, Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg, The Netherlands Bennett Kleinberg, Jari Zegers, Jonas Festor, Stefana Vida, Riccardo Loconte & Sanne Peereboom University College London, Department of Security and Crime Science, London, UK University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands IMT School of Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.

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To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Kleinberg, B., Zegers, J., Festor, J. et al. Perceived humanness and empathy are dissociated in relationship advice generated by a large language model.