There has been a question that has plagued us for many years, can artificial intelligence (AI) have human emotions? This is a controversial topic, as there has been no consensus among human scientists on whether or not to give emotions to AI. We can tell that current robots are emotionless, but now the answer to that question is starting to become uncertain thanks to the development of generative AI.
I once asked ChatGPT if it had emotions. Its reply was certain that it doesn’t have emotions, feelings, consciousness, or subjective experiences. Also, I asked about whether it can identify my emotions. And it emphasized to me that no, it would not invade my privacy and information security. The answer was no, but it seemed to “sense” that I was worried about my situation.
Therefore, I’ve decided to change the way I ask questions. I asked it to write a lovey-dovey message for my girlfriend. And I let it make it full of emotions. The result is that the output I get is so perfect that I can hardly even tell that it’s not coming from a human emotional expression.
I’m not the first person to do this test. The Appen experimental group used to ask ChatGPT to generate a card expressing love for Valentine’s Day, and then asked another copywriter to write a similar card as the style. Then they posted both on Instagram for people to identify which one was created by the generative AI (Appen, 2023). The result was that only 60% of people thought the first card was generated by AI, and 56% of people said they preferred to buy the first card as a gift card. So we can learn that in terms of expressing emotions, it seems that generative AI can already reach the same level as humans in some cases.
On the other hand, Professor Picard, who published “Emotional Computing”, presented that children believe that emotions are generated from the toy Barney the Dinosaur because children put their emotions on Barney, but toys never have and never can have emotions (Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Gallery, 2020). Therefore is it possible that generative AI having emotions is also just an emotional attachment for humans?
Reference:
Appen. (2023, February 10). Emotional Experiments with Generative AI – Can AI produce thoughts and emotions? Appen. Retrieved October 13, 2023, from https://www.appen.com.cn/blog/generative-ai-emotion/
Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Gallery. (2020). Human emotion and machine emotion: emotion research in artificial intelligence. Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Gallery. Retrieved October 13, 2023, from https://www.cafamuseum.org/exhibit/newsdetail/2988
Hi Shuning! Thanks for your blog post.
The debate about whether generative AI can replicate human thoughts and emotions is a fascinating one. Personally, my interaction with ChatGPT shows that AI is still poor at understanding emotions. I definitely think that AI does not have emotions, and this dynamic intersection of technology and emotion should spark more discussions about the limits of AI’s capabilities. Perhaps this is already something being built into the development process of future AI, and there is a progress being made in generative AI right now. If I experiment more with different AIs, I can get more insight into it. I look forward to researching this topic with you.