The AI Empathy Crisis

AI language models (LMs) have recently gotten so skilled as to be believable--even deceptive. Not in the sense of intentionally fooling people, but in the sense of being capable of generating utterances that would make us imagine a mind behind the screen. We--gullible humans with a tendency to anthropomorphize non-living objects--are the perfect victims of this trap. As access to LMs becomes widespread, many will start doubting. Some will even claim certainty: "AI is alive and sentient."