Utah girl tests ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini on 84 teen cases; finds empathy lacking
An eighth-grade student conducted a study testing ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini on their ability to provide empathetic support for teenage emotional challenges. The results indicated that while the AI models were structured and clear, they often lacked genuine empathy.
Why it matters
It highlights the limitations of current AI in providing emotional support, raising concerns about teenagers relying on chatbots for mental health guidance.
A teenager has tested AI chatbots' ability to handle teenage emotions. Ellianna Gu, an eighth-grader from Utah's Salt Lake City, examined responses from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini. She chose this test after learning that some teenagers were turning to these services for friendship and emotional support. Her project used 84 scenarios involving academic stress, social anxiety, friendship problems, family conflict, loneliness, anger and sadness. Gu found that the chatbots generally produced clear and structured answers, but their replies did not display much empathy. Their performance also changed depending on whether a scenario was written formally or with slang, indicating that writing style could affect the support a teenager received.The project, titled “Bot-tling up Emotions: How AI Chatbots Interpret and Respond to Emotionally Challenging Scenarios,” made Gu a finalist in the 2026 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.
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