The Empathy Gap

CHAPTER 8When the robots start to cry

Over my decade-long exploration, I always worked on the assumption that computers could never match humans in the field of empathy. I looked at characters such as Sheldon Cooper from the series, The Big Bang Theory. This robotic personality seemed unable to understand the nuances of human emotion in the people around him. It wasn't that he was an evil character; this lack of understanding seemed to be inherent in his DNA. He just was born without empathy.

I came to suspect that there are many people like this, myself included. We can imagine a sliding scale of empathy in each person and indeed many tools — such as the Hogan Empathy Scale, Perth Empathy Scale and Toronto Empathy Questionnaire — provide users with a score of their empathic capabilities. In my mind, one end was home to the incredibly intuitive, natural empaths. People like my late Nana, who seemed to know what you were feeling before you and were so in tune with what others were experiencing. At the other end of the scale was me, Sheldon and many people I have encountered who feel they just weren't born with it. But as part of this spectrum, I had assumed that even those down my end would always be superior at empathising compared with the cold, hard motherboards of a computer. Right?

In 2023, a group of researchers decided to put this idea to the test. Using a now seemingly ancient version of OpenAI's ChatGPT released in November 2022, they wanted to know how a large language ...