Bear in mind, it is stated in the article that "It is a well-studied phenomenon that humans react with empathy towards artificial systems that display certain human or animal-like characteristics." Cars, boats, airplanes don't have to have consciousness to have "aliveness" or be worthy of naming and is commonly accepted and internalized by humans everywhere. This falls short of the epistemological religiosity required by "AI is alive" when the only proof that other humans are alive is indeed an act of faith. But I digress.

So a falsifiable hypothesis might be:

Sociopaths have no empathy at all. Their perception that some other empathizes with them or that their empathy with the other is recognized by the other is some random function based on their internal dialogue and whether they think they get a better cookie by stating that empathy exists when prompted by the experimenter. By comparison, people who score higher on some Empathy Scale (tm) state that empathy exists at a higher or lower rate than the sociopathic control group.

HTH. I don't claim that hypothesis personally, as stated that's what I was maybe hoping to find. I'm just a programmer, whether that's programming computers or minds is sometimes unclear.