The Illusion of Empathy? Notes on Displays of Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction
Open accessAbstract
From ELIZA to Alexa, Conversational Agents (CAs) have been deliberately designed to elicit or project empathy. Although empathy can help technology better serve human needs, it can also be deceptive and potentially exploitative. In this work, we characterize empathy in interactions with CAs, highlighting the importance of distinguishing evocations of empathy between two humans from ones between a human and a CA. To this end, we systematically prompt CAs backed by large language models (LLMs) to display empathy while conversing with, or about, 65 distinct human identities, and also compare how different LLMs display or model empathy. We find that CAs make value judgments about certain identities, and can be encouraging of identities related to harmful ideologies (e.g., Nazism and xenophobia). Moreover, a computational approach to understanding empathy reveals that despite their ability to display empathy, CAs do poorly when interpreting and exploring a user’s experience, contrasting with their human counterparts.
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Current training objectives result in LLMs being overly sycophantic.
“For example, current training objectives result in LLMs being overly sycophantic [34, 123].”
From Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers. (2025) · cites this paper as [34]
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References 34 · Cited by 80
- Authors
- Cuadra, A., Wang, M., Stein, L. A., Jung, M. F., Dell, N., Estrin, D., & Landay, J. A.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- Jacobs Institute (US)
- Cornell Tech (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-05-11
- Pages
- 1-18
- OpenAlex
- W4396831952
- Cited by
- 80
- References
- 34
- Citations by year
- 2026: 40 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 4
- FWCI
- 36.50
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- NSF (National Science Foundation) (2026577 & 1700832)
- Stanford PRISM Baker
- Digital Life Initiative
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- empathy, chatbots, large language models, human-computer interaction, value judgments, National Socialism, xenophobia, deception, exploitation, Eliza, Amazon Alexa
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