AI Can Help Us Be Better, More Empathetic Humans

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Albert Einstein famously said, “Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person's eyes. It is not learned in school; it is cultivated over a lifetime.”

True empathy is something that’s developed and felt personally. It allows us to step into someone’s shoes and take action in a different way based on everything we’ve experienced.

While AI is really good at understanding what people are thinking and feeling, it doesn’t actually feel. It doesn’t have a lifetime of experiences to pull from.?

But…does AI need to feel to express empathy??

I say no! And on Tuesday’s livestream , I explained why I think AI is better at empathy than humans in some ways — and how it can augment our skills.

But what is empathy?

There are three types of empathy: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate.?

Cognitive empathy involves understanding another person’s state. You don’t feel their emotions directly; you just understand and consider their feelings. Emotional (or affective) empathy occurs when you feel what the other person feels, while compassionate empathy is the ability to sense what others need from you — and feel compelled to take action.

All three require an ability to see the world through another person’s eyes, to remove judgment and approach the situation without bias, and to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings. With the core tenets of empathy in place, you know how to respond, meet their needs, and support them at that moment.??

AI excels at cognitive empathy. It can take input — like body language , facial expressions, how fast someone is speaking, tone of voice, how hard someone is typing, skin temperature — and understand what that means. Then, it uses that information to inform its response.?

What’s fascinating is that AI can use that information and a person’s history to understand their current situation and how they got into it. It can seamlessly connect background information with real-time information to understand a person’s mental state, emotions, and thoughts — and prepare you to do the actual empathy work.

But it’s not about replacing humans. It’s about reinforcing our empathy and overcoming our limitations, like fatigue and biases.

How artificial empathy is used today

These tools might not be a stand-in for human empathy, but they can help us be better humans by augmenting our reserves and preserving our energy for times when only human empathy will do.

And we all know people with lower emotional intelligence . Some leaders just aren’t emotionally tuned in and lack empathy. And our biases can get in the way -- it can be hard for me to connect with someone if they remind me of an annoying relative. AI can boost our empathy skills and give us cues on how to respond in a more empathetic way. Here are ways we’re already seeing artificial empathy in action:

1. Writing empathetic responses improved with AI, as shown in a recent study that compared responses from real doctors versus ChatGPT. The AI won, with 41% of the AI-generated rated as more empathetic than the human doctors. And the University of Washington tested using AI to support peer mentors. When someone asks a question, the AI edits the mentor’s response in real-time so it’s more empathetic and supportive.?
2. Marketers use emotion recognition software like Affectiva to understand what’s working — and what’s not. They’re gauging people’s reactions to ads and optimizing content for TV shows and movie trailers. ?
3. Call centers use real-time AI guidance tools from companies like Genesys and Cogito to detect — within seconds — how someone feels based on their tone of voice and the speed at which they’re speaking. Then, it rewrites an agent’s script to help them respond empathetically.?
4. Addressing loneliness was identified by the surgeon general as a top health priority. Apps like Replika simulate empathetic conversations, providing some solace. A woman developed Replika after her best friend passed away. She missed talking to him, so she uploaded all their messages and trained an AI to continue having those conversations with him. The more conversations you have, the more you tune the AI — and the more empathetic it becomes.
5. Conversations can improve with conversation analytics. Tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom have sentiment analysis built-in to understand meeting engagement, something that's increasingly used by sales teams for training purposes and also in real-time to tune their pitches.

We can use these tools to detect feelings and learn how to respond in an appropriate way. I have a family member who is on the autism spectrum and he would benefit from the development of "empathy goggles" that support him in his conversations and engagements.

We could all use a bit more empathy in our lives and work, to support us to have empathy beyond our biases and abilities. My dream use case: a mansplaining detection app that can detect and notify the speaker to stop. Please, somebody, build this app!

Remember, it’s not about AI replacing humans ; it’s about bridging the gap and helping us learn more to better serve the needs of our customers, clients, patients, and students. To do this right, we need to program empathy deeply into the AI algorithms being written today.

As we’re building these AI tools and centering empathy in the technology, we might not always be successful. There’s a learning curve! But what if you didn’t fail? What if you never failed again? (Who wouldn’t love that?!) Join me next week, on Tuesday, May 30 at 9 am PT , to learn a technique that will guarantee you never fail again.

Your Turn

Have you experienced empathy with artificial intelligence? When did you come across it? What was the experience like? I’d love to hear if you realized you were talking to a machine or if — at some point — that faded away and you felt like you were having a true conversation. Let me know in the comments if you’ve felt like AI has truly understood you!