ChatGPT is excellent at writing "fluffy" pieces full of empathy, compassion, PR talk, politician speech, and any other wordy flavor you need.
As an engineer who is unable to produce such writing, this tool is quite helpful!
I think you're putting a bunch of completely different things in the same basket.
Making the text more fluffy will not make it more empathetic, not only (but mainly) because there isn't anyone to empathise with the respondent. Our bullshit receptors are good spotting dishonesty, so it'll just sound cringe, putting it at the same level as PR talk. But that's not empathy or compassion, just cheap and obvious packaging.
> As an engineer who is unable to produce such writing, this tool is quite helpful!
I genuinely thought you were being sarcastic here. Of course you are and you don't need to use more filler words for that.
I do think that there's value in using GPT for training purposes here, that is learning how one could express themselves in a more context appropriate way. This is not much different from stylistic advice, e.g. in many languages a one word yes/no response to a question is considered neutral, whereas in English it can be considered rude/abrupt, so people use question tags more often.
Is this a bad joke? What exactly leads you to that conclusion? People fall for dishonesty and straight up lies all the time. We're awful at recognizing it. Maybe you're the one in a billion who can spot a lie at a million miles, but the vast majority can't.
If I had to count with my fingers how many times people wondered whether someone was sincere or just polite, I’d have to be a thousand-finger person.
Of course not, but empathy in communication (not in action) is full of fluff. It almost requires it.
>Our bullshit receptors are good spotting dishonesty, so it'll just sound cringe
All "genuine" affirmation for the sake of empathy sounds cringe to me. I'd rather the doctor devoted their time to doing their job well instead of trying to make someone feel heard and validated - especially in an ER scenario where they are juggling critical patients. This tech can help with that.
Not doing this can make the job actively harder.
Empathy doesn't require fluff at all. (Think of all the short, poignant messages you've sent or received when someone is upset.)
The corporate need to not give ground on a complaint is where all that reassuring, repetitive, empty BS comes from.
> All "genuine" affirmation for the sake of empathy sounds cringe to me. I'd rather the doctor devoted their time to doing their job well instead of trying to make someone feel heard and validated - especially in an ER scenario where they are juggling critical patients. This tech can help with that.
Honestly with "for the sake of empathy" it sounds like you really don't place a high value on empathy (which is not unusual, or necessarily wrong). But if that is the case you're quite obviously not the right person to assess whether ChatGPT and the like can "help with that" in that context! :-)
If it is short and not fluffy enough, it risks sounding dismissive. Those short messages generally pave way for a deeper conversation about the subject.
>Honestly with "for the sake of empathy" it sounds like you really don't place a high value on empathy (which is not unusual, or necessarily wrong).
Not really, I think empathy is important in the right setting, it is not the most important thing. Certainly not in the ER if the doctor is overworked and have lives at stake. If they have the bandwidth, sure. If not, can't blame them.
>But if that is the case you're quite obviously not the right person to assess whether ChatGPT and the like can "help with that" in that context! :-)
Disagree. I know how to sound empathetic for those that need it. Some people need words of affirmations and validation to be lifted. I am not one of them but I understand. It is not that hard. Modern LLMs are more than capable of creating the prose for that and more. There is a time and place for everything though. My empathy generally drives me to action and solving problems.
But that isn't actually empathy, and people can tell the difference.
> Some people need words of affirmations and validation to be lifted.
Not the words. The understanding and sharing that underpins the words.
My point is this: if you think empathy can be faked successfully, you simply aren't the right sort of person to decide whether the results of automated faking with an LLM are valuable to the listener.
Because people can very often tell when empathy is being faked. And when they do discover that empathy is being faked, you are not going to be easily forgiven.
Empathy implicitly involves exposing someone's feelings to the air, as it were, in order to identify that you understand and share them. So faked empathy is variously experienced as insulting, patronising, hurtful, derisive etc.
Using an LLM to create verbose fluffy fake empathy is going to stick out like a sore thumb.
If this isn't something you find easy to understand at a level of feeling, don't fake empathy, especially at volume. Stick to something very simple and an offer of contextually useful help.
> My empathy generally drives me to action and solving problems.
I think this is noble and valuable, and I would in your shoes stick to this. Offers of assistance are a kindness.
But you should never pretend to share someone's feelings if you don't share their feelings. Especially not in volume.
- people are having two separate conversations: one about empathy, another about an empathetic-sounding style
- many commenters use different definitions of empathy and compassion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
When a big mistake has happened and you need to apologize, it had better be coming from you yourself. If you think you can improve it by delegating it to a fancy autocorrect software, you're missing the point of why we apologize. Or if you think a bot is more 'empathetic' than a human paying attention, you've lost touch with what it means to be empathetic. A bot can't even feel, let alone feel your situation vicariously.
The problem is that, exposed to enough writing that seems empathic but isn't, a person will learn that empathic writing is not sincere. We lose that as a society in the same way that if I check my email and see a "YOU'VE WON" subject I don't get excited, because I know it's fake.
Do we really want that? A world in which when you see an empathic message, the first thing you think of is that it's fake? I find the idea to be quite sad.
The converse could be true: maybe being inundated with fake empathy is almost as good as being inundated with the real thing, ala placebo effect (or the studies which have shown that just forcing yourself to smile can actually improve your mood).
The sentiment will be no less fake. It'll just be better written.
Stripping that out might ironically reduce the need: Of people come to expect their messages to be automatically stripped of fluff, why include it in the first place?
"Chatgpt, summarize this email into a few bullet points!"
Somehow, I doubt we'll notice. The reason we don't send the bullet points email today is that the receiver will think we're angry with them. In University the engineers all needed alcohol as a social lubricant, if chatgpt replaces it I expect we'll trade hangovers for higher electricity bills and carry on.
Faked empathy literally isn't empathy. (Fake compassion is a little more arguable; there are clearly situations where faked compassion is better than no compassion.)
Not everyone needs this or can do this on the same scale. I have really had to learn to find empathy and be unafraid of it, and I definitely have nearly zero tact (if you have no tact, you practise thinking good things).
But if you need to be able to practise empathy and compassion regularly, and you are incapable of it, find someone who can to that for you. Celebrate their ability to do it and you'll benefit from it yourself. Trade them something they don't do so well.
Nothing about the story makes sense. Doctors and nurses say these kinds of things to patients every day (I'm an EMT, I've watched them do it and I do it myself). I'm seriously wondering if the relatives were responding to the fact that the clinician was visibly reading from a piece of paper and that somehow made it more 'official'.