, Columnist
ChatGPT’s Secret Weapon Is Artificial Emotional Intelligence
The race to plug chatbots into search engines makes little sense when they are better at mimicking empathy than recalling facts.
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Earlier this year, Princeton Computer Science Professor Arvind Narayanan set up a voice interface to ChatGPT for his nearly four-year-old daughter. It was partly an experiment and partly because he believed AI agents would one day be a big part of her life.
Narayanan’s daughter was naturally curious, often asking about animals, plants and the human body, and he thought ChatGPT could give useful answers to her questions, he told me. To his surprise, the chatbot developed by OpenAI also did an impeccable job at showing empathy, once he told the system it was speaking to a small child.