The world of artificial intelligence is constantly changing and evolving. Since I started using it, there have always been features that set us humans apart from the AI. After the uncertainty and fear that caused in some people the effectiveness and reliability provided by the answers given by AI, it served as a consolation to think that they were not able to function when talking about emotional intelligence.
Well, bad news. A group of researchers have tested 6 different AI tools and the results have left them perplexed. Not only have they obtained results much better than those of humans (which we barely passed), but they have been able to develop new tests with the same guarantees as those performed by humans. Is this the end of the reasoning advantage we had over the AI?
IA tools can feel
University of Geneva (UNIGE) and University of Bern (UniBE) researchers have conducted a research to demonstrate, once and for all, whether AI is capable of feeling and managing its emotions. ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-o1, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Copilot 365, Claude 3.5 Haiku and DeepSeek V3, are six of the most famous tools and the ones chosen as samples for this experiment.
The experiment
These language models (LLMs) were subjected to a battery of questions related to the management and identification of emotions and the ability to manage them, all of which were raised by humans. Katja Schlegel explained it in one of her statements “We chose five tests commonly used in both research and corporate settings”. The results obtained were very different than expected by the researchers, who were stunned by them.
The incredible results
Humans usually get an average of 56% in the result of these tests. You don’t even have to compare them to see that this is a disgracefully low percentage. How much do you think the AI scored? An overwhelming 82%. The study’s co-author Marcello Mortillaro, senior scientist at the UNIGE’s Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) stated that this proved that IA is not only capable to understand different emotions, but also understand what implies having emotional intelligence.
IA sum capabilities
In case the results obtained in the intelligence tests were poor, researchers subjected the AI to another test. This time, they had to develop new tests of emotional intelligence themselves. Spoiler! It nailed it. After 400 people validated the tests and possible results, it was declared that they were as useful, effective and reliable as those developed by humans (which, moreover, took much more time to be written). Marcello Mortillaro stated “This reinforces the idea that LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have emotional knowledge and can reason about emotions”, which is kind of baffling, isn´t it?
Are we humans dumber than a machine?
Everything indicates so, but there is still hope. The data obtained cannot be ignored, that is a fact. We must accept that the only argument that differentiated us from the reasoning of an AI, is wobbling.
This advance can be super a breakthrough in fields such as education or conflict resolution (areas where AI was previously not capable of being resolvable). What do you think I can develop an academic plan for demotivated students, or I can interpret a conflict, coming up with different effective ways to solve it? It is kind of scary, but also useful, I guess.
Being totally objective and putting our feet on the ground, we should not be overly alarmed. It is true that AI has this new ability, but the truth is that emotions belong to a very complex world, even for humans. According to experts, these tools should always be used with supervision and without getting rid of the human presence. So let´s work in our emotions, relax and take it easy!
