Researchers at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia proposed using video games to teach AI empathy, "Pervy Tekhnichesky" was informed by the university's press service. Modern large language models cannot recognize intonations, facial expressions, and gestures, which leads to inadequate emotional responses. Manual data labeling for AI training is costly, while video games' dialogues already contain ready-made emotional annotations — lines are accompanied by indications such as "sarcastically" or "with sympathy."

The authors of the study, Associate Professor Olga Kustova and Junior Researcher Gleb Poltavets, analyzed 50 dialogues from the game Disco Elysium. As Kustova explained, video games offer natural emotional text markup, which is valuable for training empathetic models. Game dialogues are comparable to real communication and cover a wide range of emotions and speech registers — from literary to colloquial forms and fictional languages.

The interactive nature of games, where dialogues depend on player choices, is of particular value. This allows models to be trained to adapt to changing contexts, which is in demand in social robotics, digital pedagogy, and psycho-emotional support systems. Dialogues from games can serve as a basis for creating realistic chatbots, voice assistants, and virtual consulting systems.