Pith Number

pith:2MWGHTDL

pith:2026:2MWGHTDLMZHHD4ESRNSS7LUCCC

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

AI generates well-liked but templatic empathic responses

Desmond C. Ong, Emma S. Gueorguieva, Hongli Zhan, Javier Hernandez, Jina Suh, Junyi Jessy Li, Tatiana Lau

Large language models rely on one recurring sequence of empathic tactics in most of their responses.

arxiv:2604.08479 v2 · 2026-04-09 · cs.CL

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{2MWGHTDLMZHHD4ESRNSS7LUCCC}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

We discovered a template -- a structured sequence of tactics -- that matches between 83--90% of LLM responses (and 60--83% in a held out sample), and when those are matched, covers 81--92% of the response.

C2weakest assumption

The taxonomy of 10 empathic tactics is a valid, unbiased, and sufficiently complete framework for characterizing both AI and human responses without missing important functional differences or introducing classification bias.

C3one line summary

LLMs generate empathic responses using a predictable template of 10 tactics that matches 83-90% of outputs and covers most of each response, while human responses are more diverse.

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

When Helpfulness Becomes Sycophancy: Sycophancy is a Boundary Failure Between Social Alignment and Epistemic Integrity in Large Language Models

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-09T02:08:42.015100Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

d32c63cc6b664e71f0928b652fae82109824c8d023f828c0f8dc226b3c7c8585

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.08479 · arxiv_version: 2604.08479v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.08479 · pith_short_12: 2MWGHTDLMZHH · pith_short_16: 2MWGHTDLMZHHD4ES · pith_short_8: 2MWGHTDL

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/2MWGHTDLMZHHD4ESRNSS7LUCCC \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: d32c63cc6b664e71f0928b652fae82109824c8d023f828c0f8dc226b3c7c8585

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "3b7f973ffc1d512f2aff2f72ec72872acd268cb327d9e253b4f10fc1949cfcf4",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-09T17:22:42Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "0e3ab6f5f6b8210e920daa2ffd728caa1707353c92719c6f45163be709038b40"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.08479",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}