The Anti-Anti Approach

How Questioning the Critics Keeps Us Honest

I am guilty of using click-bait. I try to stay away from this pandering in my academic writing, but sometimes I cannot resist. Earlier this year, for example, I lead-authored a paper called In Praise of Empathic AI.

Yes, this article praised AI’s apparently empathic utterances, but in truth this article was less about being cheerleaders for AI and more about defending AI from critiques that we felt missed the mark.

The critique was first articulated by the brilliant Israeli neuroscientist Anat Perry, whom I now count as a friend. Her argument goes something like this: AI might be able to fake empathy by uttering words and sentences that appear empathic, but because AI is not conscious, it cannot feel emotions, including generating feelings of empathy. Further, unlike AI, people have real limits. And because of our limits—we’re often biased, tired, busy—when we extend the hand of empathy, it makes the recipient feel special and cared for.

In our paper, co-authored by Daryl Cameron, Jason …