Differentiating between generated and human-written content is important for navigating the modern world. Large language models (LLMs) are crucial drivers behind the increased quality of computer-generated content. Reportedly, humans find it increasingly difficult to identify whether an AI model generated a piece of text. Our work tests how two important factors contribute to the human vs AI race: empathy and an incentive to appear human. We address both aspects in two experiments: human participants and a state-of-the-art LLM wrote relationship advice (Study 1, n=530) or mere descriptions (Study 2, n=610), either instructed to be as human as possible or not. New samples of humans (n=428 and n=408) then judged the texts' source. Our findings show that when empathy is required, humans excel. Contrary to expectations, instructions to appear human were only effective for the LLM, so the human advantage diminished. Computational text analysis revealed that LLMs become more human because they may have an implicit representation of what makes a text human and effortlessly apply these heuristics. The model resorts to a conversational, self-referential, informal tone with a simpler vocabulary to mimic stochastic empathy. We discuss these findings in light of recent claims on the on-par performance of LLMs.

Employees have admitted that they are using ChatGPT - the revolutionary chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) - to work multiple full-time jobs. They refer to themselves as'overemployed', because the tool allows them to complete the workload of each role in at least half the time. Most of the jobs they do involve a fair amount of writing, like creating marketing materials, which the chatbot has proven to be remarkably adept at. ChatGPT is a large language model - an AI system that has been trained on huge amounts of text data to generate human-like responses to given prompts. When it was released for free by start-up OpenAI in December, it opened the eyes of the public to just how powerful the technology has become in recent years.