The no body problem: on the prospects for AI emotion

In the wake of the James-Lange theory, many accounts of emotion highlight its close connection to the body. This link may pose an obstacle to the possibility of emotion in disembodied information-processing systems, such as large language models. After clarifying the nature and the significance of this issue, we review the evidence that bears on the body-emotion relationship. We argue that this evidence is inconclusive, as far as AI affect is concerned. Since researchers have so far been confined to studying minds that pilot bodies, we do not yet have a strong case regarding the possibility of emotion in disembodied AI systems. To get to the heart of the issue, researchers need to apply established psychological methods to AI systems in order to learn whether the predictive and explanatory success of affective psychology is helped or hindered by grouping together paradigm instances of emotion in human and non-human animals with states of disembodied systems. Nevertheless, even if the emotion category cuts across embodied and disembodied minds, this leaves open many important questions about how the welfare significance of emotion relates to embodiment. We suggest that some important relation of this kind may well exist.