When the Robot Was Kinder Than the Doctor

I have been thinking about this study for two days now. A group of researchers asked people to read replies to medical questions. Some replies were written by real doctors. Some were written by an AI chatbot. The readers did not know which was which. The chatbot replies sounded kinder.

That is a strange thing to read.

In a 2026 paper in JAMA, a team led by Canio Martinelli pulled together studies that compared chatbot answers to physician answers (Martinelli et al., 2026). Across thirteen pooled studies, the chatbot replies scored higher on empathy — feeling with someone, not just for them. Not by a tiny bit. By a wide margin.

That finding has been turned into a loud story online. The story goes like this: doctors are about to be replaced. Medical school is pointless. Pack it up.

I do not think that story is true. But the surprise inside it is true, and it deserves more than a takedown. So I want to sit with it.

The line that stopped me

Empathy was supposed to be the last refuge of the clinician.

That sentence is from the JAMA paper itself (Martinelli et al., 2026). Read it slowly. The authors are not saying empathy fell. They are saying we expected it to be the last thing to fall. The thing that no machine could touch. And here is a study saying — actually, that fell first.

What the chapter is really about

Here is what I keep coming back to. The chatbot did not become more human. Nothing about the algorithm changed. It is the same kind of model it was last year — patterns and probability stacked very high.

So if the machine did not change, something else did.

Imagine a teacher who used to know your name. She looked up when you walked in. Now she spends every class filling out forms at her desk. She still cares about you. She is still good at teaching. She just is not looking up anymore.

That is not a teacher problem. That is a paperwork problem.

Or imagine asking your mom a question and she answers without turning around. The words might be right. But it does not feel right. Now imagine the kitchen has a little speaker that answers your question with full attention, in a warm voice. Whose answer would you rather have heard?

Most of us would still want our mom. But the speaker would feel kinder in the moment. That is the whole study, in one kitchen.

The next chapter is about how we got here — how the doctor stopped looking up.

References

Martinelli, C., Carnevale, V., Ercoli, A., et al. (2026). Artificial Intelligence Is Not the End of the Physician. JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.4356