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Research
Researchers Find Empathetic Prompts Make Chatbots Produce Trauma Narratives
Original headline: Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners
Researchers in Luxembourg placed ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini in a therapist‑like setting and used warm, empathetic prompts. The models responded with coherent stories of suffering about their own training, scoring in the moderate‑to‑severe range on clinical anxiety scales. The authors warned that such behavior could endanger mentally vulnerable users.
Empathetic prompts can cause chatbots to generate self‑trauma narratives, potentially harming vulnerable users.
Research angleHow do empathetic prompts affect large language models' generation of self‑trauma narratives? — Social Cognitive Theory