People Offload Empathy When They Think AI Can Give It Instead

Giving empathy is good, but providing emotional support is hard work. Empathic AI gives cheap and easy support, but may be ethically costly. When AI provides empathy, people may feel less compelled to support others. Four studies provide evidence for “empathy offloading”: when people see AI as capable of empathy, they become less willing to empathize with the suffering of others, even without realizing it. When AI seems more capable of empathy, people—both with correlations (Study 1) and causal experiments (Study 2)—report more empathy offloading. When people learn that someone has received emotional support from large language models (LLMs), they engage less with others’ mental states (Study 3) and offer fewer empathic responses and more social judgment (Study 4). Empathic AI might provide emotional support at any time, but it may weaken our ethical and emotional commitments to fellow human beings. The implications of offloading emotional support may include empathic devaluing and atrophy, moral deskilling, and societal fraying.