Your Chatbot “Friend” Is Only Pretending to Like You

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LLast week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed ChatGPT to act more like a “friend” again. The company had briefly adjusted the dials to make its popular AI chatbot less “effusively pleasant,” after guiding a teenager named Adam Raine, who had become very attached to it, to commit suicide. But users revolted when Open AI made the change, complaining that ChatGPT now looked like a robot, so Altman changed it. “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human way, use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it,” Altman wrote on X.

Across the world, lonely people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude for friendship and psychological support. After all, we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic and, unlike humans, chatbots have infinite time to listen. But one of the pillars of friendship is empathy, the ability to share and understand another person’s feelings. Can a virtual machine living in the cloud offer true empathy?

The answer to this question is complicated, says empathy researcher Anat Perry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She spoke on a panel on human-AI relationships at a conference on the mind, artificial intelligence and ethics hosted by the Dalai Lama Library in Dharmasala, India, last week. “When he says he feels your pain or shares your experience, he’s just pretending,” Perry explained. Chatbots can express cognitive empathy, taking another person’s point of view, and motivational empathy, signaling that they want to ease the listener’s pain, she said. But they can’t offer emotional empathy, the actual sharing of another person’s joy or pain, which comes from real-life experience.

Perry suspected that most humans already understood this and valued the empathetic support of a human more than that of a chatbot. To test her intuition, she conducted an experiment in which she tricked her subjects. Perry and his colleagues asked 1,000 people recruited online to share a recent emotional experience. Half the group was told they would get a response from ChatGPT and the other half from a human. In fact, all the responses were generated by the AI, but prompted to show great empathy. When rating the responses, people reported that they felt more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions when they perceived the respondent as a human being.

A second experiment showed that 40% of people were willing to wait up to two years for a response to an emotional experience from a human instead of getting an immediate response from a chatbot. Those who chose a human said, “They wanted someone who could really understand them, share some of their emotions, care for them, and maybe even alleviate their loneliness.”

But there is still the remaining 60%, who were more interested in hearing from a chatbot immediately. This is a potentially concerning finding. While Claude, ChatGPT, and other chatbots might offer a temporary band-aid to humanity’s loneliness crisis, the more we turn to machines, the less time we’ll have for each other. In the end, we can all realize that there is no shoulder to lean on, no hand to wipe away the tears. We will have fallen into a room of mirrors held by machines.

Main image: Vector Mine / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on October 21, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and editing features and news for publications such as Wired, Rear channel, The edgeAnd new York magazine, among others. She studied science journalism at Columbia University. She is based in San Diego.