What LLMpathy Can Tell Us about Received Empathy

Abstract

Psychological theories of empathy have traditionally focused on the empathizer's ability to perspective take and share another's emotions. But people today live in a day and age where AI models, like Large Language Models (LLMs) devoid of emotions and other empathic capabilities, can still produce text that makes people feel heard and comforted. Surely what people perceive in these artificially-generated responses still amounts to some form of “empathy”? To better understand this, we motivate a focus on received empathy. How empathy is received is impacted by many factors, such as recipients’ concern about maintaining self-esteem, that are nevertheless not considered by traditional psychological theories of empathy. Most importantly, the existence of "empathy" expressed by these artificial agents—what we call "LLMpathy"— allows us to shift the discussion away from givers of empathy towards empathy as perceived by the recipient. We consider the implications of perceiving LLMpathy from these agents.