Motivated Empathy & Artificial Intelligence: Psychological and Normative Considerations

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Given the proliferation of AI chatbot platforms, would and should people choose to receive empathetic expressions from chatbots? To advance this interdisciplinary debate, I will outline a motivated empathy framework on empathic AI, which outlines the importance of taking the recipient-focused perspective seriously, and directly assessing people’s preferences to understand what they want and why. I will summarize our empirical work on choices to receive empathy from AI expressers, emphasizing how choice methodologies can enhance our understanding of this debate. I will also discuss some of our ongoing work which explores how different modalities may matter for reception of AI. Broadening back out, I will discuss how human-AI interactions can be a useful lens through which to reconsider how we define our constructs in psychological science to be participatory and inclusive, and what this may imply for theory development about empathic AI.