Last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweaked ChatGPT to make it act more like a “friend” again. “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it,” Altman wrote on X. But one of the pillars of friendship is empathy, the ability to share and understand the feelings of another person. Perry suspected that most humans already understand this and value the empathic support of a human more than that of a chatbot. Half of the group was told they would get a response from ChatGPT and the other half from a human.