Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 9, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 9, 2023 - Nov 4, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 20, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Empathy – A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Empathy, a cornerstone of human interaction, is a unique quality to humans that Large Language Models (LLMs) are believed to lack.
Objective:
Our study aims to review the literature on the capacity of LLMs in demonstrating empathy
Methods:
We conducted a literature search on MEDLINE up to July 2023. Included were English language full-length publications that evaluated empathy in LLMs outputs. Excluded were papers evaluating other topics related to emotional intelligence that were not specifically empathy.
Results:
Seven publications ultimately met the inclusion criteria. All studies included in this review were published in 2023. All studies but one focused on ChatGPT-3.5 by OpenAI. Only one study evaluated empathy based on objective metrics, and all others used subjective human assessment. The studies reported LLMs to exhibit elements of empathy, including emotions recognition and emotional support in diverse contexts, most of which were related to healthcare. In some cases, LLMs were observed to outperform humans in empathy-related tasks.
Conclusions:
LLMs demonstrated some aspects of empathy in variable scenarios, mainly related to healthcare. The empathy may be considered “cognitive” empathy. Social skills are a fundamental aspect of intelligence, thus further research is imperative to enhance these skills in AI.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.