Earlier this year, Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan set up a voice interface to ChatGPT for his nearly four-year-old daughter. It was partly an experiment and partly because he believed artificial intelligence (AI) agents would one day be a big part of her life.
Narayanan’s daughter was naturally curious, often asking about animals, plants and the human body, and he thought ChatGPT could give useful answers to her questions, he told me.
To his surprise, the chatbot developed by OpenAI also did an impeccable job at showing empathy, once he told the system it was speaking to a small child.
Illustration: Constance Chou
“What happens when the lights turn out?” his daughter asked.
“When the lights turn out, it gets dark, and it can be a little scary,” ChatGPT responded through an synthetic voice. “But don’t worry! There are lots of things you can do to feel safe and comfortable in the dark.”
It then gave some advice on using night lights, closing with a reminder that “it’s normal to feel a bit scared in the dark.”
Narayanan’s daughter was visibly reassured by the explanation, he wrote in a Substack article.
EMOTIONS TRUMP FACTS
Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google are rushing to enhance their search engines with the large language model technology that underpins ChatGPT, but there is good reason to think the technology works better as an emotional companion than as a provider of facts.
That might sound weird, but what is weirder is that Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, which is based on ChatGPT’s underlying technology, are being positioned as search tools when they have an embarrassing history of factual errors. Bard gave incorrect information about the James Webb Telescope in its very first demonstration, while Bing goofed on a series of financial figures in its own introduction.
The cost of factual mistakes is high when a chatbot is used for search. However, when it is designed as a companion, it is much lower, according to Eugenia Kuyda, founder of the AI companion app Replika, which has been downloaded more than 5 million times.
“It won’t ruin the experience, unlike with search, where small mistakes can break the trust in the product,” Kuyda added.
Margaret Mitchell, a former Google AI researcher who cowrote a paper on the risks of large language models, has said they are simply “not fit for purpose” as search engines.
Language models make mistakes because the data they are trained on often include errors, and because the models have no ground truth on which to verify what they say. Their designers may also prioritize fluency over accuracy.
That is one reason these tools are exceptionally good at mimicking empathy. After all, they are learning from text scraped from the Web, including the emotive reactions posted on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and from the personal support shown to users of forums such as Reddit and Quora.
Conversations from movie and television show scripts, dialogue from novels and research papers on emotional intelligence all go into the training pot to make these tools appear empathetic.
It should be no surprise that some people are using ChatGPT as a kind of robo-therapist, according to a feature this month in Bloomberg Businessweek. One person said they used it to avoid becoming a burden on others, including their own human therapist.
To see if I could measure ChatGPT’s empathic abilities, I put it through an online emotional intelligence test, giving it 40 multiple choice questions and telling it to answer each question with a corresponding letter. It aced the quiz, getting perfect scores in the categories of social awareness, relationship management and self-management, and only stumbling slightly in self awareness.
In fact, ChatGPT performed better on the quiz than I did, and it also beat my colleague, global banking columnist Paul Davies, even though we are both human and have real emotions (or so we think).
TAPPING INTO BRAINS
There is something unreal about a machine providing us comfort with synthetic empathy, but it does make sense. Our innate need for social connection and our brain’s ability to mirror the feelings of others mean we can get a sense of understanding even if the opposite party does not genuinely “feel” what we feel. Inside our brains, so-called mirror neurons activate when we perceive empathy from others — including chatbots — helping us feel a sense of connection.
Empathy, of course, is a multifaceted concept, and for us to truly experience it, we do arguably need another warm body in the room sharing our feelings for a moment in time.
King’s College London clinical psychologist Thomas Ward, who has researched software’s role in therapy, cautions against assumptions that AI can adequately fill a void for people who need mental health support, particularly if their issues are serious. A chatbot for instance, probably would not acknowledge that a person’s feelings are too complex to understand.
ChatGPT, in other words, rarely says “I don’t know,” because it was designed to err on the side of confidence rather than caution when providing answers.
More generally, people should be wary of habitually turning to chatbots as outlets for their feelings. “Subtle aspects of the human connection like the touch of a hand or knowing when to speak and when to listen, could be lost in a world that sees AI chatbots as a solution for human loneliness,” Ward says.
That might end up creating more problems than we think we are solving. For the time being, they are at least more reliable for their emotional skills than their grasp of facts.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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