The AI Empathy Choice Paradox: People Prefer Human Empathy Despite Rating AI Empathy Higher

Recent advances in AI have enabled large language models to produce expressions that seem empathetic to human users, raising scientific and ethical questions about how people perceive and choose between human and AI sources of emotional support. Although an increasing number of studies have examined how people rate empathy generated by AI, little to no work has examined whether people prefer to receive empathy from AI. Drawing on a motivated empathy perspective, we conducted four studies (N = 691) using a novel choice-based empathy selection paradigm to investigate whether people prefer to receive empathetic expressions from human or AI sources, and how they evaluate these expressions. Across different samples and stimulus sets, we found consistent evidence for what we term the AI empathy choice paradox: participants significantly preferred to receive empathy from humans (choosing human sources in approximately 60% of trials), yet they rated AI-generated empathetic responses as higher in quality, more effective at making them feel heard, and more effortful when they did choose them. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about AI empathy by demonstrating that while people may avoid AI as an empathy source, they nonetheless benefit from AI empathy when they experience it. Our results suggest potential applications for AI in supplementing human emotional support while highlighting the importance of respecting individual preferences for empathy sources.