People Offload Empathy to AI

Giving empathy is good, but providing emotional support is hard work. Empathic AI gives cheap and easy support, but may be ethically costly. When AI provides empathy, people may feel less compelled to support others. Four studies provide evidence for “empathy offloading:” when people see AI as capable of empathy, they become less willing to empathize with the suffering of others, even without realizing it. When AI seems more capable of empathy people—both with correlations (Study 1) and causal experiments (Study 2)—people report more empathy offloading. When people learn that someone has received emotional support from large language models (LLMs), they engage less with others’ mental states (Study 3) and offer fewer empathic responses (Study 4). Empathic AI might provide low-cost, easily accessible emotional support, but it risks fraying the ethical and emotional commitments we make to other humans. When someone can go cry to AI, why bother getting splashed with their tears?