Large Language Models Produce Responses Perceived to be Empathic

Understand

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated surprising performance on many tasks, including writing supportive messages that display empathy.

• Here, we had these models generate empathic messages in response to posts describing common life experiences, such as workplace situations, parenting, relationships, and other anxiety- and anger-eliciting situations.
• Across two studies (N=192, 202), we showed human raters a variety of responses written by several models (GPT4 Turbo, Llama2, and Mistral), and had people rate these responses on how empathic they seemed to be.
• We found that LLM-generated responses were consistently rated as more empathic than human-written responses.