AI can detect and manipulate feelings to a degree, yet it has no actual emotional awareness. Chatbots and conversational AI, such as GPT-4, can further analyze the tone or context of a user — with some AI systems able to identify emotional cues in writing based on sentence structure and specific wording with an accuracy of 85%, per a MIT study conducted in 2023. They use algorithms to classify emotional states such as happy, angry, or sad. If a user sounded frustrated, the bot could respond with more sympathy or empathy. Conversely, you might get a happier response if your tone is upbeat. But these responses are not based on genuine feelings, rather based on patterns and algorithms already pre-programmed.
So, if a user states that he is feeling sad — AI will say something like "I am sorry for that" or it may offer other remedies for the user to feel more relaxed. Microsoft's AI chatbot showed a 78% accuracy in identifying sadness and responding with emotional support phrases during the test it conducted in 2022. But in comparison to human interaction, the emotional responses of AI are often regarded as limited. According to a survey performed by PwC, 63% of people believed that the responses provided by an Artificial intelligence when being emotionally engaged were not as genuine or comforting as compared to a human, because they felt the AI response lacked empathetic perspective taking.
But as much as AI is becoming an integral part of mental health applications, an AI conversation would still be mostly defined by data. In 2021, a study conducted by the American Psychological Association indicated that AI-based therapeutic tools such as Woebot were effective at helping users manage anxiety (70%) but had limited potential to develop a deeper empathetic connection with users that only human therapists could deliver. As Stanford University psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Adams puts it, AI can come alongside you to help walk through exercises with you but not “human” empathy and understanding at least for now.
The ability of AI to respond to emotions also gets better with time. The more you speak with ai, the better it process your style of conversation and emotional rhythm. OpenAI published a report indicating that as people interact more with AI systems, they can improve their recognition of emotions by 20% simply because they learn how to interpret better context and tone. While these responses can exhibit emotional processing, it should still be clear that talk to ai does not have emotions at all — only access to patterns of human emotional language.