Machine-Made Empathy? Why Medicine Still Needs Humans —Reply

In Reply Establishing a strong physician-patient relationship, which includes patients feeling heard and understood, is essential to health care. An automated tool that creates empathic language offers promising opportunities for bolstering the physician-patient relationship. We found that responses generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot were 9.8 times more likely to be considered empathetic or very empathetic than responses authored by a physician. Moreover, this difference persisted even when we compared the chatbot replies to the longest physician-authored replies.
Source: JAMA Internal Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Source Type: research