In this episode of Compassion in a T-Shirt, I sit down with Professor Michael Inzlicht from the University of Toronto and the Rotman School of Management to explore a question that feels both inspiring and unsettling: Can a machine be more compassionate than a human?

Michael’s recent study, Third-Party Evaluators Perceive AI as More Compassionate than Expert Humans, found that people consistently rated AI-generated empathic responses as more caring, understanding, and validating than those written by real people — even trained crisis line professionals. That’s remarkable, and it raises big questions about how we relate to each other and the world around us.

We dive into what inspired this research, why expressing empathy can be so costly and draining for humans, and how AI might help fill the growing gap between the need for compassion and our capacity to give it. We also talk about what really happens when people believe they’re being cared for — and whether it matters that AI doesn’t feel empathy in the way we do.

Together, we look ahead to what this could mean for therapy, friendship, and society more broadly. Could AI play a role in supporting people when human resources are stretched thin? What are the ethical risks if we rely too heavily on artificial empathy? And how do we stay connected to what makes compassion truly human?

I hope this conversation invites you to reflect on what empathy really means — and what it could become in an age of artificial intelligence.

LINK:

Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans (Ovsyannikova, Oldemburgo de Mello & Inzlicht, 2025)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00182-6

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction: Compassion and AI

00:08 The Groundbreaking Study at a Glance

01:19 Meet Professor Michael Inzlicht

02:31 ChatGPT’s First Question

03:06 What Sparked This Research?

05:13 The Future of Empathic AI

06:17 Human Emotional Intelligence vs. AI

07:31 Can AI Read Emotions?

11:47 Where AI Empathy Stands Today

12:50 How AI and Humans Compare

23:46 Designing the Study: AI vs. Human Experts

28:34 The Human Struggle with Empathy

29:34 Positive vs. Negative Empathic Responses

29:59 Measuring Empathy’s Impact

32:24 Can AI Train Us to Be More Empathic?

33:57 AI as a Motivational Interviewer

35:46 When Human Empathy Falls Short

38:53 The Promise and Perils of Empathic AI

44:57 Ethics and What Comes Next

53:10 Closing Reflections

If you would like to learn more about compassion focused therapy, you can find Dr Stan Steindl's book The Gifts of Compassion here:

https://www.ausapress.com/p/the-gifts-of-compassion-how-to-understand-and-overcome-suffering/

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AIempathy, compassion, mentalhealth, psychology, artificialintelligence, humanconnection