The Potentials and Limitations of AI Emotion Simulation: Taking Emogpt's Psychological Counseling as An Example

The continuous development of artificial intelligence emotion simulation has triggered in-depth thinking on the similarities and differences between machine emotions and human emotions. The physiological foundation of human emotions is absent from machine emotions, which are only dependent on algorithms and data. This is where the basic differences between the two exist. However, through calculation and programming, artificial intelligence can have a "emotionless" emotion and function as a "emotional machine." In response, a community of robots that provide psychological counseling—represented by EmoGPT—arose with the goal of resolving people's emotional issues and offering individualized care. While EmoGPT can offer crisis detection, sympathetic listening, professional coaching, life advise, and round-the-clock services during psychiatric counseling, it still lacks some of the experience, autonomy, and moral accountability of human emotions. . This study analyzed the potential and ethical and technological challenges of AI psychological counseling in simulating emotional responses through the application case of EmoGPT during the Shanghai epidemic.