Can Humans or AI Create Better Emotional Messages? Exploring Guilt and Empathy Appeals in Nonprofit Communication

Nonprofit organizations benefit from low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help write persuasive communications, like emotional appeals. However, as research on AI’s emotional intelligence is lacking, this experiment tests the effects of AI- vs. human-created emotional appeals (guilt vs. empathy) on donation intentions, issue involvement, and perceptions of ad effectiveness, mediated by guilt and empathy. The experiment employed a between-subjects 2 (agent: AI vs. human) X 2 (emotional appeal: guilt vs. empathy) factorial design. To test the actual effects (not source bias), study participants were not aware of the appeals’ author being human or AI. Results suggest AI matched humans in arousing empathy and outperformed humans in arousing guilt. There were no significant differences between human- and AI-generated appeals in persuasive outcomes or perceptions of ad effectiveness. Overall, findings suggest generative AI may possess enough emotional intelligence to write emotional appeals as well as humans, but future work should expand on psychological processes explaining why.