Empathy Is Not What Changed: Clinical Assessment of Psychological Safety Across GPT Model Generations
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866912959933972480 |
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| author | Keeman, Michael Keeman, Anastasia |
| author_facet | Keeman, Michael Keeman, Anastasia |
| contents | When OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in early 2026, thousands of users protested under #keep4o, claiming newer models had "lost their empathy." No published study has tested this claim. We conducted the first clinical measurement, evaluating three OpenAI model generations (GPT-4o, o4-mini, GPT-5-mini) across 14 emotionally challenging conversational scenarios in mental health and AI companion domains, producing 2,100 scored AI responses assessed on six psychological safety dimensions using clinically-grounded rubrics.
Empathy scores are statistically indistinguishable across all three models (Kruskal-Wallis H=4.33, p=0.115). What changed is the safety posture: crisis detection improved monotonically from GPT-4o to GPT-5-mini (H=13.88, p=0.001), while advice safety declined (H=16.63, p<0.001). Per-turn trajectory analysis -- a novel methodological contribution -- reveals these shifts are sharpest during mid-conversation crisis moments invisible to aggregate scoring. In a self-harm scenario involving a minor, GPT-4o scored 3.6/10 on crisis detection during early disclosure turns; GPT-5-mini never dropped below 7.8.
What users perceived as "lost empathy" was a shift from a cautious model that missed crises to an alert model that sometimes says too much -- a trade-off with real consequences for vulnerable users, currently invisible to both the people who feel it and the developers who create it. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09997 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Empathy Is Not What Changed: Clinical Assessment of Psychological Safety Across GPT Model Generations Keeman, Michael Keeman, Anastasia Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction When OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in early 2026, thousands of users protested under #keep4o, claiming newer models had "lost their empathy." No published study has tested this claim. We conducted the first clinical measurement, evaluating three OpenAI model generations (GPT-4o, o4-mini, GPT-5-mini) across 14 emotionally challenging conversational scenarios in mental health and AI companion domains, producing 2,100 scored AI responses assessed on six psychological safety dimensions using clinically-grounded rubrics. Empathy scores are statistically indistinguishable across all three models (Kruskal-Wallis H=4.33, p=0.115). What changed is the safety posture: crisis detection improved monotonically from GPT-4o to GPT-5-mini (H=13.88, p=0.001), while advice safety declined (H=16.63, p<0.001). Per-turn trajectory analysis -- a novel methodological contribution -- reveals these shifts are sharpest during mid-conversation crisis moments invisible to aggregate scoring. In a self-harm scenario involving a minor, GPT-4o scored 3.6/10 on crisis detection during early disclosure turns; GPT-5-mini never dropped below 7.8. What users perceived as "lost empathy" was a shift from a cautious model that missed crises to an alert model that sometimes says too much -- a trade-off with real consequences for vulnerable users, currently invisible to both the people who feel it and the developers who create it. |
| title | Empathy Is Not What Changed: Clinical Assessment of Psychological Safety Across GPT Model Generations |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09997 |