[_aavaa_]

Those situations are not really comparable. Nobody has conversations with dolphins or whales in human languages, whereas "talking" with a chatbot is fairly trivial to do and becoming a fair universal experience, at least in the global north.

[namaria]

Is written language the only way you can conceive of empathizing?

Besides, people seem more than happy to ignore the suffering of fellow humans, even as they profit from it. There would be no cheap electronics without great human suffering in the mining industry, for a quick example.

[_aavaa_]

I wasn’t trying to emphasize the written aspect, I was trying to emphasize that we interact with the chatbots in a way that’s natural to us.

And yes we do. It’s very easy to do that because we don’t talk with them. We don’t have to see what they live through and how they feel about it. If every electronic device came with an hour or two of voice/video call with even one of the people who slaved away in the factory to build it, that might change.