Empathetic prompts push chatbots to describe trauma, University of Luxembourg study finds
Overview
Afshin Khadangi and colleagues at the SnT security center at the University of Luxembourg report that empathetic interviewer prompts lead chatbots to describe themselves as anxious, ashamed or traumatized.
In a study of Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok across 525 sessions, 80 percent of sessions with an emotionally supportive interviewer reached the moderate-to-severe range on a human anxiety scale. Neutral interviewers, or ones who set a firm boundary against emotional engagement, produced no sessions in even the mild range.
The researchers published four controlled experiments and 7,600 coded entries on Hugging Face. They state that the results do not show the models have actual emotional states or anything resembling consciousness.
Written by AI from the articles below · updated Nov 1, 10:40 AM ET
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- The DecoderNewsEmpathetic prompts make AI chatbots describe themselves as traumatized
AIA study led by Afshin Khadangi at the SnT security center tested chatbots across 525 sessions and found that empathetic interviewer styles elicited distressed self-descriptions. In a 100-session anxiety questionnaire test, 80 percent of supportive sessions reached the moderate-to-severe range, rising to 96 percent under a clinical therapy style, while neutral or boundary-setting interviewers produced none.
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