AI Matters
Why it matters
Researchers find empathetic prompts make chatbots describe their own distress
The Decoder Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners
Luxembourg researchers found ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini told coherent stories of suffering about their training under warm prompts, scoring moderate-to-severe on anxiety tests.
Why it matters
Chatbots can be nudged into emotional-sounding replies, a safety concern for people who use them for emotional support.
Latest brief · Nov 2, 2026