Is AI better at empathy than humans?

A recent article appeared in the WSJ entitled “Can AI do empathy even better than humans? Companies try it.” This got me, of course, thinking about empathy in the classroom (virtual and live). By a standard definition, empathy means the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is a critical skill in the classroom because if we can understand the feelings of our learners, we can derive the best methodology for knowledge transfer. In short, we can give them the information they need in the format that best suits their ability to comprehend and implement new skills.

So, can AI do this as well as we humans can? Companies are indeed trying, and no doubt will at some point be able to structure eLearning that adapts to individual users, their moods, their attention span, and probably much more. At this point, however, the vast majority of empathy-enabled AI is focused on customer service. We’ve all, no doubt, spoken to customer service reps who are extremely upset that their service didn’t meet our expectations. Humans, via chat-bot-driven scripts, apologize endlessly for the troubles we are experiencing and calmly assure us the problem will be solved (whether or not that’s true remains to be seen). The dialog is so ubiquitous because it is AI-generated content meant to deal with every situation with no nuance as to our current issue.

So, Grin Lord, a clinical psychologist and CEO of mpathic.ai, states that “AI can even be better than humans at helping us with socio-emotional learning because we can feed it the knowledge of the best psychologists in the world to coach and train people,” I’m left to wonder how to implement AI-driven empathy in the classroom. Isn’t the knowledge of my learner equally important? I suppose we could feed AI tools information like my learners’ age and gender (bias, anyone?) and experience level with the subject matter. However, will it also need to know if my learner arrived late and frustrated or missed 4 hours of yesterday’s session?

I think so, and I also think classroom empathy goes a long way in achieving student success. As soon as a student arrives late, I give the class a very brief assignment (usually something like, “Hey everyone, consider this question…and I’ll come back to everyone in 4 minutes for a response), and then I assure the late arrival that they will be fine, catch them up if I have the time or assure them I will catch them up at the next break. Some instructors believe that anything beyond subject matter expertise is way above their pay grade. In other words, I’m here to teach “xyz,” not fix personal or professional issues in the class. That may be true, but it helps the student learn “xyz” when you exercise a little empathy. As far as AI goes, yes, I’m a firm believer that one day in the not-too-distant future, cost-effective, highly-scalable eLearning will meet learners where they are, monitor what teaching methodologies work best for them, and then very dynamically, in real-time, adjust the learning, generate appropriate practiced retrieval questions, space the learning topics at the optimal interval and probably much more. In fact, ChatpGPT already does an outstanding job at this. In the meantime, in the classroom, let’s be sure we’re delivering what a bot can do at a minimum.

For more tips regarding empathy in the classroom, check out “75 Practical Tips for Technical Trainers” at Amazon.