Machines have influenced human evolution. The characteristics of each era have been shaped by the tools developed since the First Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), for example, the use of steam machines instead of manual labor, and the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), represented by the use of energy. The use of electricity instead of steam power led to the Third Industrial Revolution (1950–1970), where electronic and communication devices such as computers and portable devices appeared. Today we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has witnessed the introduction of artificial intelligence in many fields, including health care, psychotherapy, and more (Hounshell, 1984; Mokyr and Strotz, 1998; Brants et al., 2007; Bell, 2019; Thirunavukarasu et al., 2023).

In psychotherapy, the early Eliza program, designed in the 1970s by Weitz Naum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a very primitive program, compared to the programs we see today. The program was distinguished by providing some comfort for postgraduate students. Some of them even liked to sit alone next to the computer, and found that the Eliza program helped them a lot, even though they knew it had no emotions, care, or empathy (O'Dell and Dickson, 1984).

On November 22, 2022, ChatGPT-3 became available to the general public. It was a surprise to the technological community and the world, and it was a powerful leap in the field of AI. AI is one of the most advanced areas of modern technology. It was followed by the most famous ChatGPT-4, which is nearly 500 times larger in terms of capacity and also processing capacity. It is the latest version of ChatGPT, launched in March 2023. This is a chatbot that belongs to linguistic artificial intelligence and uses artificial intelligence technology to interact with users in different languages. It has the ability to understand, create, analyze and edit texts, and uses more than 500 billion words from various sources to understand and create texts in smart and creative ways.

Companies then competed to produce large language models in AI: “LLMs.” It is an abbreviation of the term “Large Language Models,” which refers to AI models that are trained on large amounts of text for the purpose of understanding and generating natural language in an advanced way. Examples include the ChatGPT-3 and 4 from OpenAI, the LaMDA and PaLM models from Google (the basis for Bard), the BLOOM model and XLM-RoBERTa from Hugging Face, and the NeMO model From Nvidia, XLNet, Co:here, and GLM-130B.

Google Bard is a Large Language Model (LLM) created by Google AI. This is a machine-learning model trained on a huge dataset of text and code amounting to 1.56 trillion words. It can generate human-quality text, translate languages, write different types of creative content, and answer questions in a human-like manner. It first appeared on January 18, 2023, when it was announced at the Google AI Conference, and was released to the public on October 16, 2023. Bing AI Chat is a service provided by Microsoft that uses artificial intelligence to improve the search experience of users. Users can interact with Bing as if they were talking to another person, with Bing answering questions and providing information in a natural and friendly way. In addition, Bing can generate images directly from the user’s words.

This field has witnessed many important developments in recent years, and it is expected that it will continue to develop in the future at a faster rate and with greater leaps. The AI models allow machines to perform advanced human-like functions. This development began in the 1950s, and continued at varying rates until 2022, when deep learning, a branch of AI, became important in many practical applications such as image recognition and translation (Brants et al., 2007; Bell, 2019; Thirunavukarasu et al., 2023).

The mechanism used in ChatGPT-3 announced by Open AI was a breakthrough that resulted in an artificial intelligence program that can simulate human conversation. Since then, competition has flared among the major companies that had been preparing for such a day for years but were unable to launch a similar produce, namely, Microsoft and Google. Google Barge, Bing, and others introduced large linguistic conversation models that used natural human language relying on a large database; these were trained by interacting with people in specialties and in many fields, including the therapeutic psychological field (Hagendorff and Fabi, 2023; Han et al., 2023).

AI is classified into several categories according to the application, field, and techniques used. In general, it is divided into two types: weak, which is designed to perform a specific task such as voice recognition, and strong, which aims to imitate human intelligence in general (Russell and Norvig, 2010).

This year, large language models have evolved a lot and have reached a stage where they demonstrate human-like language understanding and generation capabilities, which in turn opens new opportunities for using measurement tools to identify the hidden values, attitudes, and beliefs that are encoded in these models. The capabilities of AI to diagnose personality traits and understand feelings and thoughts have been measured and their credibility has been verified by a number of studies (Maksimenko et al., 2018; Kachur et al., 2020; Flint et al., 2022; Han et al., 2023; Landers and Behrend, 2023; Lei et al., 2023; Zhi et al., 2023).

One of the contemporary studies that was concerned with measuring the capabilities of ChatGBT is the study that was presented in the technical report issued by OpenAI on March 27, 2023, in which it conducted tests similar to admission tests in various professional and academic American universities. It included the SATs, the Bar Exam, and the AP final exams. The results showed that the ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4.0 are capable of performing human-like on many professional and academic tests.

To achieve the research objectives of identifying the level of social intelligence among AI models comparing with psychologists, verification was carried out as follows:

To verify the differences between AI models and psychologists in SI, the average of SI scores for psychologists were extracted; the average scores were 39.19 of bachelor’s students and 46.73 of PhD holders. While the raw scores of the AI models were treated as representing independent individual samples (one total score for each model); the scores of SI were 59 of GPT4, 48 of Bing, and 40 of Google Bard.

Therefore, we used a one-sample t-test to find out whether these differences were statistically significant, as shown in Table 1.

As per Table 1, the scores of the AI linguistic models are as follows: GPT 4 was 59, Bing was 48, and Google Bard was 40. There are statistically significant differences between ChatGPT-4 and Bing and the psychologists in both academic stages. The AI models have higher SI scores than the psychologists.

As for Google Bard, the result differed; its score was almost equal to that of psychologists with a bachelor’s degree, and the differences were not statistically significant. While, its differs compared to doctoral-level, whose average was higher than that of Google Bird in SI. Table 2 shows the level of social intelligence according to the percentile and the raw score for psychologists according to qualification.

The results of this study are summarized as follows:

Figure 1 shows SI levels of AI models and psychologists.

The main question of this study was “Does artificial intelligence reach the level of human social intelligence?.” When we assess humans, we use psychological standards to estimate their level of social intelligence. This is what we did in this study, where the same measure was used on the AI represented by the large linguistic model (i.e., ChatGPT 4, Bing, and Google Bard). Our study showed important results regarding the superiority of AI in the field of SI.

The present findings showed that ChatGPT-4 completely outperformed the psychologists. Bing outperformed most of the psychologists at the bachelor’s level, while the differences in social intelligence were not significant between Bing and the psychologists at the doctoral level. Interestingly, the psychologists of doctoral holders significantly outperformed Google Bird, while the differences between Google Bird and undergraduate students were not statistically significant, meaning that Google Bird’s performance was equal to the performance of bachelor’s students on the SI scale.

The result showed that AI outperformed human SI measured by the same scale, and some of it was equal, as in the case of Google Bard, with a certain educational level, which is a bachelor’s degree, but it was lower than the level of doctoral. The human participants in this study were a group assumed to have high social intelligence, as many studies have found (Osipow and Walsh, 1973; Wood, 1984), as well as by looking at their average social intelligence measured in the current study compared to the hypothesized mean. By defining social intelligence as the ability to understand the needs, feelings, and thoughts of people in general and to choose wise behavior according to this understanding, it is practically assumed that this would reflected in the superiority of psychologists over the performance of AI. However, our results showed that the differences were of varying, with AI outperforming humans, especially ChatGPT-4, and psychologists with PhDs outperforming Google Bird, while the difference between humans and Ping was not statistically significant.

We believe that the poor performance of Google Bard in SI may be attributed to the date in which this research was conducted, as the Google Bard model was still new and in the early stages of its development, as Google may have been shocked and surprised by what the open AI had achieved. In addition, these results may be due to technical aspects related to the development of the algorithms used in Google Bard. We suggest conducting future studies to track the rapid development of these models, and the extent of their effects on the work of psychotherapists. Another pivotal point that must be pointed out is the ethical extent of the use of artificial intelligence in psychotherapy. Will AI models adhere to the ethics of psychotherapy? Will people want to receive psychotherapy provided by intelligent machines? What about the principles of confidentiality, honesty, empathy, acceptance, and client rights?…etc. These issues need further studies and guidelines for psychotherapists when using artificial intelligence services in counseling and psychotherapy.

What concerns us and those who need counseling and psychotherapy is that this study confirmed the superiority of AI models over humans. These results are partly consistent with the study of Elyoseph and Levkovich (2023) which evaluated the degree of social awareness among the large linguistic models of AI and the extent of the ability of these models to read human feelings and thoughts. They concluded that the ChatGPT was able to provide high-quality responses, and was empathic to patients’ questions, with results showing participants’ preference for chatbot responses over a doctor’s answers. Chatbot responses were also rated as significantly more sympathetic than doctor responses. Some studies that have examined AI for several purposes have indirectly demonstrated the ability of AI in several psychological and mental aspects. Some clients have reported preferring AI-powered assistants over psychotherapists because the assistants were able to deal with their feelings in a distinct and positive manner. It seems like these assistants were able to reflect on the clients’ emotions in a way that made them feel comfortable (Ayers et al., 2023; Bodroza et al., 2023; Eshghie and Eshghie, 2023; Haase and Hanel, 2023; Harel and Marron, 2023; Huang et al., 2023).

Another study by Open AI found that GPT4 outperformed humans in postgraduate admission tests in American universities. Literature has indicated that social intelligence is not only an ability in humans but also in artificial intelligence and large linguistic models based on dialog and chat in particular (Herzig et al., 2019). A recent qualitative shift has emerged in the field of artificial intelligence regarding the nature of human intelligence and its effects on the design and development of smart robots. This may create controversy, as social intelligence is added to the behavior of intelligent robots for practical purposes and to enable the robot to interact smoothly with other robots or people, that social intelligence may be a stepping-stone toward more human-like artificial intelligence (Dautenhahn, 2007; Guo et al., 2023).

These results confirm the superior ability of AI in SI, as measured by human psychological standards or personality trait tools, and through practical evaluation in conversations conducted between it and clients through the experiments (Herzig et al., 2019; Ayers et al., 2023; Bodroza et al., 2023; Eshghie and Eshghie, 2023; Harel and Marron, 2023).

However, there are references in the literature to concerns and criticisms about AI, some of which relate to errors in diagnoses related to dangerous conditions such as suicide, errors of hallucinations, and fears of moral deviations that need adequate attention and controls in the future studies (Li et al., 2022; Elyoseph and Levkovich, 2023; Grodniewicz and Hohol, 2023). Research also has pointed to a lack of consistency in their responses on psychological measures (Chang et al., 2023), and others have argued that it was necessary to define his role in specific functions (Sedlakova and Trachsel, 2023).

These differences in results may deepen the debate about psychologists’ fears of losing their profession to artificial intelligence. Many researchers believe that these fears have accompanied humans during each industrial revolution and ultimately conclude that industrial development helps humans, reduces the less competent individuals, and creates new professions that deal with the new will emerge. Although the changes this time may be more severe, psychologists will not lose their profession, but its form will change in order to adapt to the new developments. The benefit will be much greater than the losses, and the psychologist must absorb the change, live with its rapid development, and contribute to its management.

As for ethical and professional concerns, researchers believe that they are legitimate and realistic concerns, but based on the development of technology throughout history, it is clear that fear accompanies a person for his profession and ethics. However, development continues and it becomes clear that the fears are exaggerated, then some professions or part of them disappear and humans continually adapt to these changes. For example, the printing machine disappeared and there were developments in the secretarial function through the use of computers instead of the printing machine, and cotton workers turned into machine managers. This is why specialists in psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry recommend absorbing the wave by understanding artificial intelligence and its applications and making the most of this. Developments in counseling and psychotherapy.

Regarding to the ethical aspect, there are legitimate and notable concerns, so we propose multiple forms and sources of solutions to this problem, namely the enactment of laws, the development of algorithms that limit moral deviation during use, and protective programs such as forgery detectors… etc. Since development will pass and will not stop at the limits of our fears, psychotherapists and legislators will need to constantly think about solutions to problems that may affect the profession and its ethics.

In conclusion, the ChatGPT 4 and Bing models have higher social intelligence than psychologists in the bachelor’s and doctoral stages, whereas the Bard model is on par with psychologists in the bachelor’s category and is outperformed by psychologists in the doctoral stage. According to our results, AI models can be ranked according to their performance on the social intelligence scale from highest to lowest, respectively, as follows: ChatGPT 4, Bing, and finally Google Bard.

The results of the current study can be useful and used to guide psychotherapists in their dealings with clients. Research evaluating the performance of AI models on measures of SI and other aspects of personality is urgently needed to improve the uses of AI in psychotherapy and mental health care planning.

There are some limitations in this study. The sample to verify the psychometric properties of the Social Intelligence Scale was small and homogeneous, and this is a relative shortcoming. This procedure was an additional confirmation since the validity and reliability of the scale had been previously verified by Sufyan (1998). There is a need for future studies that verify validity in a more precise manner on a large sample and in other ways to verify reliability in a more diverse or more precise way.

The social intelligence of the artificial intelligence models was evaluated only once. We were not able to re-evaluate and compare the two evaluations after a period due to the rapid developments in AI applications, which will affect the consistency of results over time. We suggest future longitudinal studies to track changes over time as AI models evolve. We used a subscription version of Chat GPT-4, and free versions of Bing and Google Bird, a difference that may have affected the results given the features available in the paid models compared to the free versions that available to the general public.

It was difficult to obtain a large sample of psychologists in Saudi Arabia, and we relied instead on psychological counseling students at the bachelor’s and doctoral levels (there were no master’s programs at the time of preparation of the study). We realize that this sample does not represent psychotherapists in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, it provides a good picture of human performance compared to the performance of AI in the SI scale. On the other hand, the study’s sample is confined to male counseling psychology students from a single university. This limited and homogeneous group might not reflect the broader population of psychologists or the general population’s social intelligence. Therefore, additional studies with a more diverse and representative sample are needed.

Although the study used a simple and homogeneous sample, its results are an important indicator of the superiority of these industrial systems, even though they appeared a very short time ago as systems simulating human behavior, and it is an indicator of the rapid future development of these systems in the coming years. This study is one of the first studies in this field, as it highlights and documents a historical stage in time for the beginning of the real competition between humans and machines in mental development, and the competition between the systems themselves. The results of the current study is also an indicator of industrial development compared to humans, paving the way for future studies that follow up on these developments and competitions.

Future studies will need to address the limitations of the current study. Our findings provide essential evidence about the degree of social intelligence in AI models that can be evaluated by human standards. These results will have promising future applications in the fields of assessment, diagnosis, and psychotherapy.

It would be fair to point out that the current study evaluated the performance of three different artificial intelligence models and compared them with a reasonable-sized sample of psychologists. In addition, most previous studies did not focus on evaluating social intelligence in artificial intelligence models as much as they focused on evaluating emotional intelligence (for example, Elyoseph et al., 2023), which increases the importance of the current study.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving humans were approved by The Research Ethics Committee at King Khalid University. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

NS: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft. FF: Conceptualization, Methodology, Project administration, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. SA: Conceptualization, Investigation, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. JM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Writing – original draft.