Nope. AI (broadly construed) does not understand or have experience in the relevant ways necessary to empathize or express empathy. It could parrot an empathetic response, but it has no understanding/experience of what it is doing. - ThreadSky

shengokai.bsky.social • 3 days ago

Nope. AI (broadly construed) does not understand or have experience in the relevant ways necessary to empathize or express empathy.

It could parrot an empathetic response, but it has no understanding/experience of what it is doing.

Reposted from Karen Costa (she/her)

Curious: would y'all say that #AI experiences/expresses cognitive empathy but not emotional empathy? 🧐

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shengokai.bsky.social•3 days ago

Moreover, I wouldn't say that an AI expresses anything. An act of expression requires taking up external material and reshaping it through experience such that as the external material is organized, so too is the internal material. To create an expressive object requires having experience.

shengokai.bsky.social•3 days ago

Put another way, expression is the result of the organization of inner experience by means of shaping external materials and requires a constant attention to how those materials mediate and make present the experience that we're attempting to make present through the act of expression.

shengokai.bsky.social•3 days ago

Because AI has no experience, it can't express anything. Moreover, the AI doesn't engage in any monitoring of the objective material for its fitness to the experience expressed. Even prompt driven generative AI rely on HUMANS to supply the experiential component which drives the refining of prompts.

shengokai.bsky.social•3 days ago

So, basically the answer is no on both fronts. It doesn't experience cognitive empathy, nor can it express cognitive empathy.

karencosta.bsky.social•3 days ago

yeah, I dunno. parroting an empathetic response is more than most of our country is able to do rn so that's not nothing.

shengokai.bsky.social•3 days ago

See, that’s because the bar for empathy in this country is in hell. Satan and all the demons are having the most extreme limbo contest with the bar for empathy.

missbingley.bsky.social•3 days ago

Plus, in my experience, the AI apps like Sonia do a really good job of parroting empathy, acknowledgment, and gentle words without any of the hidden inherent judgments or biases that humans can’t actually hide

karencosta.bsky.social•3 days ago

THANK YOU!!!!!

doctorallisona.bsky.social•3 days ago

AI is literally a regression algorithm with extra steps. A fancy line of best fit used to predict an output from a set of input variables. Pretty much a more complex version of y=mx+c.

missbingley.bsky.social•3 days ago

OK, so now I’m wondering where this original idea came from— What LLM was used to train this supposed depressed system? My Space?

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