Artificial empathy or computational empathy is the development of AI systems—such as
companion robot A companion robot is a robot created for the purposes of creating real or apparent companionship for human beings. Target markets for companion robots include the elderly and single children.
Examples
There are several companion robot prototypes ...
s or virtual agents—that can
detect emotions and respond to them in an
empathic
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cog ...
way.
[Yalçın, Ö.N., DiPaola, S. "Modeling empathy: building a link between affective and cognitive processes." ''Artificial Intelligence Review'' 53, 2983–3006 (2020). .]
Although such technology can be perceived as scary or threatening, it could also have a significant advantage over humans for roles in which emotional expression can be important, such as in the health care sector.
For example, care-givers who perform emotional labor above and beyond the requirements of paid labor can experience chronic stress or burnout, and can become desensitized to patients.
Emotional role-playing between a care-receiver and a robot might actually result in less fear and concern for the receiver's predicament ("if it is just a robot taking care of me it cannot be that critical"). Scholars debate the possible outcome of such technology using two different perspectives: Either the artificial empathy could help the socialization of care-givers, or serve as role model for emotional detachment.
A broader definition of artificial empathy is "the ability of nonhuman models to predict a person's internal state (e.g., cognitive, affective, physical) given the signals (s)he emits (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture) or to predict a person's reaction (including, but not limited to internal states) when he or she is exposed to a given set of stimuli (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture, graphics, music, etc.)".
[Xiao, L., Kim, H. J., & Ding, M. (2013). "An introduction to audio and visual research and applications in marketing". ''Review of Marketing Research'', ''10'', p. 244. .]
Areas of research
There are a variety of philosophical, theoretical, and applicative questions related to artificial empathy. For example:
# Which conditions would have to be met for a robot to respond competently to a human emotion?
# What models of empathy can or should be applied to Social and Assistive Robotics?
# Must the interaction of humans with robots imitate affective interaction between humans?
# Can a robot help science learn about affective development of humans?
# Would robots create unforeseen categories of inauthentic relations?
# What relations with robots can be considered authentic?
Examples of artificial empathy research and practice
People often communicate and make decisions based on inferences about each other's internal states (e.g., emotional, cognitive, and physical states) that are in turn based on signals emitted by the person such as facial expression, body gesture, voice, and words. Broadly speaking, artificial empathy focuses on developing non-human models that achieve similar objectives using similar data.
Streams of artificial empathy research
Artificial empathy has been applied in various research disciplines, including artificial intelligence and business. Two main streams of research in this domain are:
# the use of nonhuman models to predict a person's internal state (e.g., cognitive, affective, physical) given the signals he or she emits (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture)
# the use of nonhuman models to predict a person's reaction when he or she is exposed to a given set of stimuli (e.g., facial expression, voice, gesture, graphics, music, etc.).
Research on
affective computing
Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While so ...
, such as
emotional speech recognition
Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While some ...
and
facial expression detection
Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While some ...
, falls within the first stream of artificial empathy. Contexts that have been studied include oral interviews, call centers, human-computer interaction, sales pitches, and financial reporting.
The second stream of artificial empathy has been researched more in marketing contexts, such as advertising, branding, customer reviews, in-store recommendation systems, movies, and online dating.
Artificial empathy applications in practice
With the increasing volume of visual, audio, and text data in commerce, many business applications for artificial empathy have followed. For example,
Affectiva
Affectiva is a software company that builds artificial intelligence. The company claims its AI understands human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use, by analyzing facial and vocal expressions. An offshoot of MIT Media ...
analyses viewers' facial expressions from video recordings while they are watching video advertisements in order to optimize the content design of video ads. HireVue, a hiring intelligence firm, helps firms make recruitment decisions by analyzing audio and video information from candidates' video interviews. Lapetus Solutions develops a model to estimate an individual's longevity, health status, and disease susceptibility from a face photo. Their technology has been applied in the insurance industry.
Artificial empathy and human services
Although artificial intelligence cannot yet replace social workers themselves, the technology has been deployed in that field. Florida State University published a study about Artificial Intelligence being used in the human services field.
The research used computer algorithms to analyze health records for combinations of risk factors that could predict a future suicide attempt. The article reports, "machine learning—a future frontier for artificial intelligence—can predict with 80% to 90% accuracy whether someone will attempt suicide as far off as two years into the future. The algorithms become even more accurate as a person's suicide attempt gets closer. For example, the accuracy climbs to 92% one week before a suicide attempt when artificial intelligence focuses on general hospital patients".
Such algorithmic machines can help social workers. Social work operates on a cycle of engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation with clients. Earlier assessment for risk of suicide can lead to earlier interventions and prevention, therefore saving lives. The system would learn, analyze, and detect risk factors, alerting the clinician of a patient's suicide risk score (analogous to a patient's cardiovascular risk score). Then, social workers could step in for further assessment and preventive intervention.
See also
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Artificial human companion Artificial human companions may be any kind of hardware or software creation designed to give companionship to a person. These can include digital pets, such as the popular Tamagotchi, or robots, such as the Sony AIBO. Virtual companions can be used ...
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* ''
Blade Runner
''Blade Runner'' is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, and written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick ...
'' / ''
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
''Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'' (retroactively retitled ''Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'' in some later printings) is a dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968. The ...
''
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Case-based reasoning
In artificial intelligence and philosophy, case-based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems.
In everyday life, an auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recal ...
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Commonsense reasoning
In artificial intelligence (AI), commonsense reasoning is a human-like ability to make presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations humans encounter every day. These assumptions include judgments about the nature of physical objec ...
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Emotion recognition
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Genera ...
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Facial recognition system
A facial recognition system is a technology capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces. Such a system is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, and wor ...
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Glossary of artificial intelligence
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary o ...
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Human–robot interaction
Human–robot interaction is the study of interactions between humans and robots. It is often referred as HRI by researchers. Human–robot interaction is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from human–computer interaction, artificial i ...
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Pepper (robot)
Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot manufactured by SoftBank Robotics (formerly Aldebaran Robotics), designed with the ability to read emotions. It was introduced in a conference on 5 June 2014, and was showcased in SoftBank Mobile phone stores in ...
* Soft computing
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Evolutionary computing
In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms, they ...
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Machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Artificial empathy
Affective computing
Computational neuroscience
Cybernetics
Emerging technologies
Emotion
Formal sciences
Unsolved problems in computer science
Empathy