AI-Generated Empathy: Opportunities, Limits, and Future Directions

Desmond C. Ong; Amit Goldenberg; Michael Inzlicht; Anat Perry

doi:10.1177/09637214261444274

AI-Generated Empathy: Opportunities, Limits, and Future Directions

Desmond C. Ong^*
, Amit Goldenberg
, Michael Inzlicht
, Anat Perry

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Greater numbers of people are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for empathy and emotional support. Here, we review and synthesize recent empirical work on how people perceive empathy from AI versus from humans. Growing evidence points to two dueling effects and a paradox: AI produces language that is rated higher in empathy than language written by humans, but when people perceive text as coming from AI versus a human, they rate it as less empathic. However, despite sometimes rating AI more empathic or having to wait for human empathy, people still show a preference for human empathy. This emerging literature carries significant implications for fundamental research on empathy and for public discourse as the use of AI for emotional support continues to grow.

Original language	English
Journal	Current Directions in Psychological Science
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214261444274
State	Accepted/In press - 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

artificial intelligence
empathy

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10.1177/09637214261444274

Cite this

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AI-Generated Empathy: Opportunities, Limits, and Future Directions

Abstract

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Keywords

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