SAO said:
The interesting thing is that she did seem to experience some kind of joy when she got free. She was smiling and curious. So kinda like an OP, some kind of basic emotions and potentially a very limited and selective empathy. Or an authoritarian - largely following a program with some glimpses of humanity here and there. But who knows!
I thought her gestures when she was free, e.g. looking at the plants in the forest, were a sign that she did have consciousness, rather than just a simulation of consciousness. If no-one was around to watch her, why make a joyful gesture? On the other hand, even this could still be interpreted as that she was only simulating consciousness, i.e. "I have read about flowers on the Bluebook. But this is the first time I have actually seen one. So I will make the kind of gesture a creature that experiences joy might make on encountering a flower for the first time, even though I am not actually
feeling joy."
If she were actually conscious, I think this is more interesting. Otherwise she is just a clever assembly of nuts-and-bolts.
So if she was conscious, was she also capable of empathy or not? She did leave her helper trapped in a room rather than go out on a romantic date with him. I like the way the movie leaves various possible answers up for debate, and makes us wonder about what empathy is. In a topsy-turvy way, the behavior of the human helper, with his empathy-based motivation to help free her, becomes predictable for the robot. The conventional wisdom is that robots act predictably, while humans have greater freedom. In this case the human's actions become predictable, based on what an empathic human would do, while the robot does not have those limitations.
Or perhaps the robot's intelligence is so advanced that it might only have empathy towards another similar robot, and feels little empathy towards humans. I think to some extent humans feel progressively less empathy to others depending on the distance of the relationship, e.g. you feel more empathy to people you know well, such as people in your immediate environment, friends or family members, than to people you have never met. So she might have regarded the human who freed her with the same amount of empathy as e.g. a normally empathic human might feel for a bug biting their skin.
Perhaps the whole circumstances of her creation, including both her creator and the helper who came to quiz her, might just be something she wants to put behind her while getting on with exploring the world and standing at crossroads. Maybe empathy takes longer to learn, and a suitable social environment to develop it in. She was only 1 (year?) old, and came from an information-rich but socially deprived origin.