According to Devarajan Pillai’s Artificial Empathy: How AI Is Transforming Mental Health, artificial empathy refers to the attempt to create AI systems that can recognize and respond to human emotions in a way that appears empathetic. It can be trained to understand facial expressions, voice tone, heart rate, and sweat. AI is great, but humans can navigate complex emotional landscapes, such as finding subtle cues, empathizing with others, and forming meaningful relationships relevant to identifying and managing mental health problems.
According to Yair Neuman’s AI for Understanding Context, AI has artificial empathy and does not genuinely experience emotions. It operates on algorithms and data patterns. It may struggle with the nuances of complex emotional situations that require a deep contextual understanding of mental health problems. The experiences of humans influence present interpretations of life. Situational awareness and social context require understanding the relationships between individuals and groups and require being able to recognize social norms and expectations. It needs to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.
