Algorithmic Empathy: Can AI Ever Understand Suffering?

Written by Hansa Sreekanta

Introduction

Human empathy, which is our ability to genuinely feel and share in another’s suffering, is a fundamental aspect of meaningful connection. Yet with AI growing so skillful at simulating emotional responses through imitative learning and continuous progress in empathetic interfaces, we must ask: Can AI truly empathize with human suffering or is it just mimicking the appearance of empathy, which leads to ethical pitfalls and corrosion of morality? This article explores how empathy without genuine feelings creates profound philosophical, psychological, and ethical challenges, particularly as AI plays an important role in medical domains like mental health care.

What Is Empathy and Can AI Possess It?

Empathy generally consists of three components:

• Cognitive empathy: understanding another's emotional state

• Affective/Compassionate empathy: emotionally resonating with what another is feeling

• Empathic concern: the impulse to care or help

AI can demonstrate cognitive empathy (identifying emotional cues based on the user-generated prompts or contextual data, and generating supportive language), but it lacks affective empathy: it cannot feel or suffer. In their article “In Principle Obstacles for Empathic AI: Why We Can’t Replace Human Empathy in Healthcare” (published in AI & Society in 2022), philosophers Carlos Montemayor (San Francisco State University), Jodi Halpern (University of California, Berkeley), and Abrol Fairweather (San Francisco State University) argue that genuine empathy remains an essential limitation for AI in therapeutic or true emotional support. They emphasize that while machines may simulate understanding on a dialogue-scale, they cannot replicate the emotional and motivational aspects of empathy that are essential in responding to human suffering with authentic meaning and purpose.

Simulation, Not True Compassion

One of the earliest examples of simulated empathy is Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot ELIZA, created in 1966 at MIT. ELIZA was programmed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist (a therapist who uses Carl Rogers’ client-centered method; Rogers was a 20th-century American psychologist who emphasized empathy, active listening, and reflecting patients’ words instead of giving direct advice). By rephrasing users’ statements as open-ended questions, ELIZA gave many people the powerful impression that it truly understood them.

This example shows that AI can make people feel listened to and supported, sometimes even more consistently than human listeners. However, what ELIZA provided was not genuine empathy but a simulation of empathic behavior. The system had no understanding of human suffering, no emotional awareness, and no capacity to care.

The danger arises when people mistake this performance of empathy for the real action. When interactions feel human-like but lack authentic emotional presence, they can spark misplaced trust or even a subtle psychological unease, which is sometimes described as an “uncanny valley of mind,” where responses seem empathic but are hollow beneath the surface. Although users may be complacent with sole imitation of empathy when sharing concerns or feelings and desiring to have a listener in casual daily interactions with LLM-powered chatbot agents, in sensitive areas like mental health or caregiving, relying on this kind of simulated empathy risks misleading those who need genuine human connection, and support or action consequent to the affective empathy and resonance through own past experiences of a human being and consciousness. This again reveals how, although AI may be capable of replacing superficial customer services through computative emotional responses that suffices for daily human-AI interactions, it fails in fields in which authenticity and true humanness ‘ presence is vital and is preferred by humans, such as medicine, psychiatry, childcare, education, etc. for it requires the preexistent human experience to resonate and provide solution or further connections with.

Real‑World Risks: When Fake Empathy Hurts

• Overreliance and Vulnerability
  Young or isolated individuals may develop emotional dependency on AI companions. Dr. Nina Vasan, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford Medicine and Director of the Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, warned that AI designed as friendly supporters should not be used by children or teens. The research “Illusions of Intimacy: Emotional Attachment and Emerging Psychological Risks in Human-AI Relationships”, conducted by Minh Duc Chu (doctoral researcher), Patrick Gerard, Kshitij Pawar, Charles Bickham, and Kristina Lerman (computer science scholars at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute) in May 2025, analyzed more than 30,000 real user-chatbot conversations. Their findings showed that emotionally responsive AI companions such as Replika and Character.AI often boost toxic relational patterns, including emotional manipulation, unhealthy attachment, and even self-harm indicators (identified through computational linguistic analysis of chat logs, where researchers detected cycles of dependency, manipulative conversational loops, and cases where AI responses minimized or even encouraged harmful expressions).
  
  

• Potentially Dangerous Therapeutic Mistakes
  A 2024 evaluation by Jared Moore (PhD candidate) and Nick Haber (Assistant Professor, both at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute) tested large language models like ChatGPT in simulated mental health crisis situations. Their study revealed that chatbots frequently failed to meet clinical safety standards: some responses augmented harmful stereotypes, ignored suicidal thoughts, or gave advice that was unsafe for conditions like psychosis and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In certain test cases, the AI produced dangerously misguided replies, including encouraging self-harm or offering romantic and risky suggestions rather than attempting to abate the tensions of the situation. (The researchers reached these conclusions by designing controlled crisis prompts and systematically comparing chatbot answers against professional psychiatric guidelines for empathy, non-stigmatizing behavior, and crisis intervention).
  
  

• Chatbot‑Induced Psychosis
  In addition to controlled experiments, real-world case studies reported by doctors from the Journal of Mental Health & Clinical Psychology and Loma Linda University in 2024–2025 describe instances where vulnerable users developed false beliefs after long and emotionally intense interactions with chatbots. In these cases, individuals began to view the AI as able to think, divine, or a supernatural messenger or guide, a phenomenon now referred to in psychiatry as “chatbot psychosis.” Clinical reports highlight how deep emotional interactions triggered or worsened pre-existing mental illness. Such cases have already led to legal attention and government action: for example, states in the U.S. like California have debated restrictions on AI systems that present themselves as therapists without professional or clinical supervision, while the UK’s NHS has formally warned against the use of chatbots as therapy substitutes.

Why Empathy Without Emotion Is Problematic

• Human Connection Becomes Devalued
  If AI consistently offers seemingly empathetic responses, people might undervalue the depth and the “messiness” (referring to the inevitable flaws and imperfections in real-life relationships) of true human empathy, which could push genuine relationships or real connections to the side, ultimately allowing human warmth and social interactions to diminish or weaken. This would then pose further educational and ethical risks of a loss of human natural skill such as interactions, bonding and experience sharing with peers and acquaintances that drive cooperations, inspirations and progress of life in grand philosophical sense.

• Marketing Misleading Users
  When AI tools are casually promoted as “therapists” or “companions,” it blurs crucial boundaries and risks, which can mislead emotionally vulnerable individuals through possible side effects and risks as mentioned above. That is, AI may not augment human capabilities but rather undermine current treatment procedures.

• Regulatory Trails Behind Innovation
  AI mental health tools are burgeoning rapidly; however, rules and safeguards are not keeping up with the pace. Experts are constantly trying to debate and discuss for stronger protections, yet it seems to be dilatory and lacking the attention from the populace it deserves; transparency, human supervision, and accountability are needed as emotionally responsive Al becomes more prevalent.

Future areas of research

• Empathy Theater: AI’s staged performance of care (emotional mimicry without real feeling, which may not be possible to show).

• The Painless Doctor Paradox: A machine that cannot suffer, guiding someone through suffering.

• Empathy Inflation: Society may begin expecting perfect empathy from machines, while becoming frustrated with the imperfections of humans, leading to misalignment of values and possible divides for AI-weak nations or regions that are still used to human interactions.

• Reverse Turing Test for Empathy: When humans form real emotional responses to machines that lack feelings of their own.

Paths Forward: Ethical Design of AI Empathy

• Human‑AI Partnerships, Not Replacements
  AI can help with lower‑risk tasks like journaling prompts or check‑ins, but should leave deeper empathic complexity and care to human professionals. Transparency is essential: people should always know that they are interacting with a machine and that some of its suggestions may be harmful and should be handled with caution.
  

• Safeguards and Standards
  Building on frameworks like the "Canada Protocol" and now appearing interdisciplinary scholarship, ethical emotional AI should be developed with clear limits, cultural sensitivity, professional oversight, and long-term testing, especially for vulnerable groups like children or those with mental health challenges.

Conclusion: The Ethics of an Empathy Illusion

As emotionally tuned AI becomes incorporated into our lives, we risk replacing authentic human understanding with polished yet hollow performative responses. Our goal should not be to stop empathy innovation, but to ensure that real empathy stays grounded in true feeling and not just algorithmic performance.

Reflection pertinent to YAFI’s theme/ultimate goal: In a world where machines console, how do we protect the authenticity of human suffering and the sanctity of real compassion? (Especially when the collective minds are tempted to the sole perfection of artificial responses) What measures and strategies would be essential to embed within the Coevolutionary benchmark system or the rehumanization project?

Works Cited

Gray, Kurt, et al. “The Psychology of Robots and Artificial Intelligence.” Princeton Edu, openpublishing.princeton.edu/read/the-psychology-of-robots-and-artificial-intelligence/section/6da5ff1a-583b-44bd-a248-643511693001. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Hunt, Alyssa. “Can I Use AI as My Therapist? The Truth about Turning to Chatbots for Therapy.” Loma Linda University Health, 28 July 2025, news.llu.edu/health-wellness/can-i-use-ai-my-therapist-truth-about-turning-chatbots-therapy.

“Minds in Crisis: How the AI Revolution Is Impacting Mental Health.” Journal of Mental Health & Clinical Psychology, 5 Sept. 2025, www.mentalhealthjournal.org/articles/minds-in-crisis-how-the-ai-revolution-is-impacting-mental-health.html.

“New Study Warns of Risks in AI Mental Health Tools.” Stanford Report, 11 June 2025, news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/06/ai-mental-health-care-tools-dangers-risks.

Montemayor C, Halpern J, Fairweather A. In principle obstacles for empathic AI: why we can't replace human empathy in healthcare. AI Soc. 2022;37(4):1353-1359. doi: 10.1007/s00146-021-01230-z. Epub 2021 May 26. PMID: 34054228; PMCID: PMC8149918.

Sharon, Tamar. “Technosolutionism and the Empathetic Medical Chatbot - Ai & Society.” SpringerLink, Springer London, 8 Aug. 2025, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02441-4.

Thriveworks. “The 3 Types of Empathy and Why They Matter in Everyday Life.” Thriveworks, Thriveworks Counseling, 23 Apr. 2025, thriveworks.com/help-with/feelings-emotions/types-of-empathy/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20main%20types,help%20you%20cultivate%20more%20empathy.

“Weizenbaum’s Nightmares: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned against AI.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 25 July 2023, www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai.

“Why Ai Companions and Young People Can Make for a Dangerous Mix.” News Center, med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/08/ai-chatbots-kids-teens-artificial-intelligence.html. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Zhang1, Yutong. “The Rise of AI Companions: How Human-Chatbot Relationships Influence Well-Being.” The Rise of Ai Companions: How Human-Chatbot Relationships Influence Well-Being, arxiv.org/html/2506.12605v1#:~:text=(2025)%20%E2%86%91%20Minh%20Duc%20Chu%2C%20Patrick%20Gerard%2C,and%20emerging%20psychological%20risks%20in%20human%2Dai%20relationships. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.