This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More people are turning to artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots for companionship and to address loneliness. But can AI-generated empathy replace human connection?
In a study published in the journal Communications Psychology, a team led by researchers at Penn State found that human users rated AI-generated empathetic responses higher in quality than human-generated empathetic responses, yet they preferred human empathy over AI. Daryl Cameron, the Sherwin Early Career Professor and associate professor of psychology at Penn State, and doctoral student Joshua Wenger discussed AI empathy and why it may prove an effective complement to—and not a replacement for—human companionship. Cameron: In our work, we took a research approach that allowed people to show through their choices what they actually want and care about.
Studying people's actual choices in the moment can sometimes reveal their preferences. That was a core part of our study. What's interesting is how, on the one hand, people don't seem to want AI empathy, but there is some subset of the population that does want it, so it's complicated.
Nevertheless, people think that the actual content of what the large language models are saying is empathetic, interesting and validating, and so there's this paradox between what people want and what they choose to opt into, versus their actual evaluations of the material. Wenger: We called this effect the "AI empathy choice paradox," and it's this consistent pattern where people rate AI empathy or empathetic expressions from AI as higher in quality and more empathetic than those from real humans. It makes people feel more heard, cared for and validated than responses from human empathizers.
But despite this higher quality, people still prefer to receive empathy—even lower-quality empathy—from humans over AI. Wenger: For every response in our study, we asked people to rate how empathetic they found each response. We also asked them how much effort they thought the empathizer put into writing the response.
This builds upon some theoretical work by the scholar Anat Perry and her paper "AI will never convey the essence of human empathy." In it she argues that one of the more important aspects of human empathy is the exertion of effort. Daryl's work has shown that empathy is an effortful act. The idea is that I, as a human empathizer, expend my emotional resources to express care for you, and by doing so, I am signaling your importance to me in some way.
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