As more people turn to large language models (LLMs) during personal crises, the companies behind them are engineering these AI-powered models to be more personal, empathetic and understanding when prompts indicate a user is in emotional distress.

The trend is raising concern about how well prepared ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other popular LLMs are to provide appropriate emotional support.

To address this concern, Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new neural framework that examines how different training sources influence empathy and social reasoning within these AI-powered models.