Models Match or Surpass Objective Human Performance on Various Tasks
Artificial Intelligence systems increasingly match or surpass human performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Recent advances in large language models have yielded conversational abilities often indistinguishable from human dialogue. In this chapter, we argue that whether artificial agents should be considered empathetic depends on how empathy itself is defined and how it relates to subjective experience. We show that different philosophical schools produce distinct, and often incompatible, answers to the question of whether such a system should be considered genuinely empathetic. On one hand, empathy is a functional trait that can be fully characterized by observable behavior; on the other hand, empathy is inseparable from subjective experience and conscious feeling. Drawing on the philosophical notion of the “zombie” we introduce a thought experiment involving a hypothetical chatbot that exhibits perfect empathic behavior across all conceivable benchmarks while lacking any subjective experience. This framing allows us to disentangle functional performance from conceptual attribution and to examine whether empathy judgments depend on observable behavior alone or on assumptions about inner experience. As artificial agents become increasingly integrated into emotionally contexts, understanding how and why humans attribute empathy to machines becomes a pressing scientific, ethical, and societal question.