C. Daryl Cameron

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so empathy is often characterized as having a few different meanings.

So in psychology, they often talk about emotion sharing.

So if someone shares in your experiences, you're feeling sad, I'm feeling sad.

There's often perspective taking.

So if I try to understand what you're thinking and cognitively predict your beliefs and mental states, that doesn't have to involve emotion.

And then there's compassion.

So having a kind of a warm sense, a motivation to help you feel better, to improve your well-being.

And with large language models and AI, there's been much writing in psych and ethics about trying to figure out to what extent, when it gives you a message, how can we code whether it's displaying each of those three pieces?

My only response would be that, you know, you'll sometimes will see things that sound like that verbally.

You know, I feel your pain.

I know just what you're going through.

And, you know, of course, without sentience, you know, that's functionally impossible.

But people still, when they read such language, they can still respond as if someone's expressing that to them.

Well, you know, I think that if you think about what perspective taking is as a prediction of what someone or something's going to do in our environment, I mean, I think of the three empathy facets that I talked about, that's the one that many scholars have argued is the closest to what we might say AI is capable of doing.

Although, of course, how it's actually doing that is different than what you and I might do when we try to perspective take things.

But in terms of just predicting what will happen next, you know, functionally, it is the closest of those three empathy facets many have argued.

Well, so this is where it gets really, really philosophically and psychologically interesting, I think.

So if I'm empathizing with you, it's a two-way street, right?

So I'm as the expressor sending you warm feelings of regard or trying to share in your feelings, but it's also you're receiving that empathy, and so you are catching that.