Actually, a lot of non LLM AI development, (and even LLMs, in a sense) is based very fundamentally on concepts of negative and positive reinforcement.

In such situations... pain and pleasure are essentially the scoring rubrics for a generated strategy, and fairly often, in group scenarios... something resembling mutual trust, concern for others, 'empathy' arises as a stable strategy, especially if agents can detect or are made aware of the pain or pleasure of other agents, and if goals require cooperation to achieve with more success.

This really shouldn't be surprising... as our own human (mamallian really) empathy fundamentally just is a biological sort of 'answer' to the same sort of 'question.'

It is actually quite possible to base an AI more fundamentally off of a simulation of empathy, than a simulation of expansive knowledge.

Unfortunately, the people in charge of throwing human money at LLM AI are all largely narcissistic sociopaths... so of course they chose to emulate themselves, not the basic human empathy that their lack.

Their wealth only exists and is maintained by their construction and refinement of elaborate systems of confusing, destroying, and misdirecting the broad empathy of normal humans.

I don't care if it's genuine or not. Computers can definately mimic empathy and can be programmed to do so.

When you watch a movie you're not watching people genuinely fight/struggle/fall in love, but it mimics it well enough.

Well, that's a bad argument, this is all a guess on your part that is impossible to prove, you don't know how empathy or the human brain work, so you don't know it isn't computable, if you can explain these things in detail, enjoy your nobel prize. Until then what you're saying is baseless conjecture with pre-baked assumptions that the human brain is special.

conversely I can't prove that it is computable, sure, but you're asserting those feelings you have as facts.