What Is Required for Empathic AI? It Depends, and Why That Matters for AI Developers and Users

TL;DR

This paper clarifies that empathic AI requires different capabilities depending on specific applications, emphasizing the importance of understanding these distinctions for ethical and effective AI development and use.

Contribution

It introduces a framework categorizing empathy-related capabilities and demonstrates their relevance across diverse medical AI use cases.

Findings

Different empathic AI applications require distinct capability sets.

Understanding empathy capabilities aids ethical AI development.

Framework helps AI developers tailor empathic features to specific contexts.

Abstract

Interest is growing in artificial empathy, but so is confusion about what artificial empathy is or needs to be. This confusion makes it challenging to navigate the technical and ethical issues that accompany empathic AI development. Here, we outline a framework for thinking about empathic AI based on the premise that different constellations of capabilities associated with empathy are important for different empathic AI applications. We describe distinctions of capabilities that we argue belong under the empathy umbrella, and show how three medical empathic AI use cases require different sets of these capabilities. We conclude by discussing why appreciation of the diverse capabilities under the empathy umbrella is important for both AI creators and users.