Can AI Feel Our Grief? The Promise of Affective Computing

As our lives are getting more fast-paced, finding someone for emotional support can be challenging. Could AI potentially bridge this gap and offer solace in times of grief? Let’s find out!

It isn’t always sunshine in our lives. We all momentarily face grief for many reasons and often find ourselves without shoulders to cry on or people to vent to. When you’re emotionally drained and need support, not having someone to talk to is tragic on its own.

However, with AI having its role in everything we do daily, can it help you with your grief? In this post, we’ll dive deep into a recent AI phenomenon, affective computing.

We also tried different AI chatbots to find out which one could be the perfect grieving partner for your dark days.

How Does AI Process Human Emotions and Sentiments?

AI and machine learning systems aim to detect, analyze, and respond appropriately to human emotions. This emerging field is known as “affective computing”. It relies on parsing large datasets of human communication to identify emotional cues.

Let’s explore how an AI chatbot would interpret this sentence:

“My grandmother passed away, and I feel so heartbroken.”

First, the AI would process the text to recognize keywords and word associations. Terms like “passed away” and “heartbroken” correlate to negative emotion concepts like grief, mourning, and sadness. The chatbot checks these words against large lexicons, categorizing vocabulary by emotional states.

Next, advanced sentiment analysis looks at word positioning, context, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other linguistic features. This helps the AI gauge the intensity of emotion and determine if it’s positive, negative, or neutral. Our example sentence conveys deeply felt grief based on the extreme term “heartbroken” and mentions a relative’s death.

The AI then references datasets linking grieving processes to appropriate responses. It “understands” typical stages like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance from analyzing patterns in human conversations. So it can tailor its reply to the user’s current state.

Finally, the bot crafts a compassionate response by applying what it’s learned about grief, emotional range, and careful listening skills. Over many conversations, the AI continually fine-tunes its ability to comprehend sentiments. With enough quality training data, AIs can learn to perceive emotions similarly to humans.

While still an emerging science, affective computing marks exciting progress in AI emotional intelligence. With sufficient development, AI grief companions could offer essential empathy and support during difficult times.

Real-World Applications of Affective Computing

Here’s how the emotional capabilities of AI can help identify and deal with negative sentiments and bring positive changes across industries and use cases:

Healthcare

• Detect clinician burnout by analyzing facial cues, speech, and notes
• Monitor patients’ mental health by tracking emotional states over time
• Customize treatment plans based on each individual’s emotional needs

Education

• Adjust teaching methods to student energy levels and moods
• Reduce anxiety and improve focus through emotion-aware tutors
• Personalize curriculums by aligning content to affective states

Customer Service

• Sympathize accurately with customer frustrations
• Consider cultural and emotional nuances in eye contact, tone, responses, and behaviors
• Promote diversity and inclusion with empathetic AI screening
• Eliminating biases in hiring and promotion

The possibilities are limitless in fields involving interpersonal interactions. As the supporting technology matures, affective computing aims to transform any industry relying on emotional intelligence. We’ve only begun tapping into AI that can understand and thoughtfully respond to human sentiments.

We Tried Different GenAI Chatbots – Here’s How They Responded to Grief

Imagine you’re sitting with a friend and ask, “Does grief ever end?”

While their response might not be psychologically correct, they may console you and make you feel better about your situation. They might also make you believe that whatever grief you’re suffering from will end or lessen as soon as you move on to better or different things in life.

But how does AI respond if you ask the exact same question?

At first, we started with the most popularly used GenAI chatbot – ChatGPT 4o. While still being surrounded by criticism regarding its responses, it is still a very powerful tool, providing accurate responses for the most part.

We asked ChatGPT whether grief ever ends. Here’s what it had to say:

“Grief is a deeply personal and complex experience, and there isn’t a definitive answer that applies to everyone. For many, grief doesn’t necessarily end but instead evolves over time.”

It then went on to further elaborate on different grief-related theories – something I didn’t ask for. 

So, while ChatGPT’s response might be technically accurate, it won’t offer the comfort someone seeking solace would be looking for when asking this question.

We went to Claude to see if it would respond more humanely. Here’s what it had to say:

“Grief doesn’t typically end in the sense of disappearing completely, but it often evolves and changes over time.”

Again, it was a response quite similar to ChatGPT’s but still a little more empathic.

Moving forward, we asked Gemini the same question, and it gave an interesting response:

“Grief doesn’t end in the sense of simply disappearing. It’s more accurate to say it evolves and changes over time. While the sharp, intense pain of early grief may lessen, it often leaves a lasting impact on who we are and how we see the world. Think of it like a wave; initially, the waves are huge and crash over you, making it hard to breathe. Over time, the waves become smaller and less frequent, but the ocean is still there.”

While it still didn’t console you, it did mention that the pain of grief you’re facing will reduce with time, but it will also lead to some noticeable changes in your overall perception of life. Moreover, it used a pretty interesting analogy to explain its point, just like a therapist would. 

This was a much better response than both Claude and ChatGPT.

Overall, it’s quite clear that while AI has been causing technological disruption across use cases like programming, content generation, and workflow management, it still has a lot of ground to cover in order to enable true human connection and provide professional support. 

There’s Potential – But Also Significant Room for Improvement

The possibilities of affective computing are endless. However, the technology is still very much in its early stages when accurately judging the full range of human emotions and providing truly empathetic responses. 

As we saw from testing popular AI chatbots, their reactions to a question about grieving were technically accurate but lacked the warmth and reassurance a human friend would offer.

So, if you’re suffering from grief, reach out to a friend or a therapist. They’ll provide you with much better and more effective support than an AI chatbot.

However, if you’re a business owner who just wants to integrate a personalized AI-powered chatbot or virtual assistant into your mobile app, the technology’s lack of psychological connection or conduct won’t matter much.

AI models are powerful enough to understand essential human sentiments and provide your users with accurate, relevant responses.

Therefore, if you want to make your mobile app experience more interactive, Cubix is your trusted, AI-first mobile app development partner.

Contact our representatives, and we’ll see how we can perfectly align your product vision with our exceptional mobile app development and AI integration prowess.