When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-like Caregiver Support
Study of how large language models prompted to sound peer-like produce language implying lived experience when supporting family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Caregiver support exchanges from online communities are compared with prompted peer-like responses from LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini and MedGemma using psycholinguistic analysis and qualitative narrative coding. The authors name a synthetic lived experience paradox: the experiential language that makes AI support feel warm also falsely positions the system as someone with lived experience.
Publisher
Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment (HAIC '26) (ACM); University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; OSF HealthCare; University of Massachusetts Amherst; Indiana University Indianapolis
Published
16 Sept 2026
Added
today
Key Findings
- Online human peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than prompted peer-like AI responses
- Human peer support draws on typed personal narratives; AI responses reproduced their emotional work while generalising, flattening or fabricating the experiential grounding
- The authors argue caregiver-support AI needs mechanisms that separate supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience
Methodology Notes
Mixed methods: psycholinguistic comparison of caregiver online-community support exchanges against prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs, plus qualitative typing of personal narratives; corpus sizes not stated in the abstract. OpenAlex publication date 2026-09-16; the Crossref issued date is 2026-09-27 (conference date). The ACM Digital Library blocks automated access; verified from the OpenAlex record (abstract, nine authorships, affiliations) on 2026-09-17.
Topics
Authors
Goel, Drishti, Goyal, Agam, Duddu, Veda, Pal, Olivia, Rodriguez, Violeta J., Brown, Daniel S., Karkar, Ravi, Yoo, Dong Whi, Saha, Koustuv
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Cite This
APA
Goel, Drishti et al. (2026). When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-like Caregiver Support. Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment (HAIC '26) (ACM); University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; OSF HealthCare; University of Massachusetts Amherst; Indiana University Indianapolis. https://doi.org/10.1145/3834580.3838755
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