C. Daryl Cameron

And so if you think of it as what's called a dyad, you know, you really are, the receiving end of things does matter quite a bit too.

And so if someone reads a message from a chatbot and it makes them feel a certain way in normal, you know, human to human interactions, that is a critical part of the empathetic process.

And, you know, so much has been focused on, well, can AI feel?

And that's certainly half of the story.

But I think an important other half of that story is the recipient, the recipient's perspective.

How does it make them feel?

And to what extent does that play a role in defining something as empathy in the first place?

You know, I love that comparison because in many cases, human, yeah, human empathy expression can be fickle and unreliable.

And, you know, in clinical medical settings, there's much discussion of things like caregiver burnout and empathy management and empathy fatigue, compassion fatigue.

And the human empathy we get in everyday life is wildly variable.

It can be really deeply rich and authentically felt, or it can be kind of like what you were describing, kind of surface acting, so to speak.

Yeah, and so I think that with that sort of example, I mean, you can see that both human empathy is expressed to us.

It can range so much in terms of the quality of the experience or doing the expressing of it.

But if we think about what it means to receive empathy, I think that there could be a lot more attention paged to the value that you and I might have or ascribe to receiving empathy from someone.

And that part of the process, I think, needs to be foregrounded a little bit more in terms of how we think about AI empathy.

You know, this has come up a lot.

If you say please to a chatbot, is it appropriate, right?

I mean, are you using kind of norms of conversation that are typical for human-to-human interaction for a case that doesn't really apply?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think this is where it gets interesting, too, because even if you think like using politeness norms with AI doesn't really matter in the same way as it would for a human, you might nevertheless also think that if I cultivate politeness in my conversations generally, even with the chatbot, does it help me?

become more polite in other contexts does it sort of set a norm for myself that like okay generally when i ask someone for something i'm going to say please and does it help me kind of build that sort of virtue of character of of um being polite in most of my conversations and encounters