As loneliness grows, more people are turning to AI chatbots, not just for answers, but for empathy, companionship and someone to talk to. But can artificial empathy ever truly replace a human connection?A study published in the journal Communications Psychology found that human users rated AI-generated empathetic responses higher in quality than human-generated empathetic responses, yet they preffered human empathy over AI.The researchers at Penn State analysed AI empathy and why it may prove an effective complement to – and not a replacement for – human companionship.
What does the study reveal about how people choose to use AI?
The research approach 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 the 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, the researchers said.The study noted that 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.The researchers 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 empathisers.However, the study found that despite this higher quality, people still prefer to receive empathy – even lower-quality empathy – from humans over AI.
What drives this preference for human or AI empathy?
For every response, the researchers asked people to rate how empathetic they found each response. They also asked them how much effort they thought the empathiser 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. Research has shown that empathy is an effortful act. The idea is that human empathisers expend theur emotional resources to express care for others, and by doing so, they are signaling the other person’s importance to them in some way. And because empathy is objectively effortless for AI, it’s not emotionally effortful.Interestingly, what the new study found is that when people were asked to rate the perceived effort in the AI- and human-generated responses, they rated AI overall as exerting more effort in the creation of these responses. What this means is complicated, because it’s unclear whether people were answering the question as if AI were a human or genuinely perceiving effort.Regardless,the researchers found this difference where, for AI empathy, it seemed like the empathiser put a lot of work into their response.The study also found that the more effortful a response is perceived as being, the more empathetic people tend to perceive it. So, if someone puts a lot of effort into writing a response, it tends to make the response seem more empathetic. That could be one driver of the high-quality AI empathy.