Chatbots outscore therapists on empathy only because they're built to agree with you |
Get Quartz in your inbox
Free daily briefing on global business news.
Chatbots outscore therapists on empathy only because they're built to agree with you
Chatbots' high empathy scores really measure agreeableness, not clinical skill. Patients in crisis need pushback more than constant validation
demaerre / Getty Images
When a panel of health care professionals scored chatbot responses as warmer and more empathetic than physicians' in a 2023 study, the finding traveled fast. It has since been read as proof that AI might be better at the emotional core of therapy than the people trained to do it.
The study, led by John Ayers and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, compared 195 single written responses from physicians on Reddit $RDDT's r/AskDocs forum with single written responses generated by ChatGPT. Licensed health care professionals judged chatbot responses as empathetic or very empathetic 45.1% of the time, compared with 4.6% for physicians, and preferred chatbot responses 78.6% of the time.
The chatbot never had to follow up, build trust over weeks, or tell a patient something they didn't want to hear. The parts of therapy it skipped are the parts that determine whether a patient gets better.
The limited test behind the chatbot empathy scores
The chatbot's advantage came from the length of its responses. Physicians wrote a median of 52 words per response compared with 211 for the chatbot, giving the appearance that they didn't care as much as their AI counterparts. But the sample was biased. Doctors only typed shorter replies because they had other patients to see throughout the day. The Reddit Q&A took up a rather small part of it. These doctors were never going to out-write a model designed to elaborate and handle multiple........