AI systems have been known to be able to elicit emotions and reactions in humans, even very strong such emotions and reactions, since the early days of the field. A classic example is Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, which gives its name to the "Eliza effect", i.e. the tendency to anthropomorphise AI programs [1], even very simple ones, with a small range of pre-scripted behaviours, like ELIZA.

For a longer example involving a robot specifically designed to mimick emotions by manipulating actuators to change its "facial" expressions, see Rodnay Brooks' third part of his tripartite essay on "Steps towards super-intelligence", specifically the chapter titled "7. Bond With Humans" [2] (there's no direct link to the chapter but you xcan search for it in the article).

I quote from Rodney Brooks' article:

In the 1990’s my PhD student Cynthia Breazeal used to ask whether we would want the then future robots in our homes to be “an appliance or a friend”. So far they have been appliances. For Cynthia’s PhD thesis (defended in the year 2000) she built a robot, Kismet, an embodied head, that could interact with people. She tested it with lab members who were familiar with robots and with dozens of volunteers who had no previous experience with robots, and certainly not a social robot like Kismet.

I have put two videos (cameras were much lower resolution back then) from her PhD defense online.

In the first one Cynthia asked six members of our lab group to variously praise the robot, get its attention, prohibit the robot, and soothe the robot. As you can see, the robot has simple facial expressions, and head motions. Cynthia had mapped out an emotional space for the robot and had it express its emotion state with these parameters controlling how it moved its head, its ears and its eyelids. A largely independent system controlled the direction of its eyes, designed to look like human eyes, with cameras behind each retina–its gaze direction is both emotional and functional in that gaze direction determines what it can see. It also looked for people’s eyes and made eye contact when appropriate, while generally picking up on motions in its field of view, and sometimes attending to those motions, based on a model of how humans seem to do so at the preconscious level. In the video Kismet easily picks up on the somewhat exaggerated prosody in the humans’ voices, and responds appropriately.

In the second video, a naïve subject, i.e., one who had no previous knowledge of the robot, was asked to “talk to the robot”. He did not know that the robot did not understand English, but instead only detected when he was speaking along with detecting the prosody in his voice (and in fact it was much better tuned to prosody in women’s voices–you may have noticed that all the human participants in the previous video were women). Also he did not know that Kismet only uttered nonsense words made up of English language phonemes but not actual English words. Nevertheless he is able to have a somewhat coherent conversation with the robot. They take turns in speaking (as with all subjects he adjusts his delay to match the timing that Kismet needed so they would not speak over each other), and he successfully shows it his watch, in that it looks right at his watch when he says “I want to show you my watch”. It does this because instinctively he moves his hand to the center of its visual field and makes a motion towards the watch, tapping the face with his index finger. Kismet knows nothing about watches but does know to follow simple motions. Kismet also makes eye contact with him, follows his face, and when it loses his face, the subject re-engages it with a hand motion. And when he gets close to Kismet’s face and Kismet pulls back he says “Am I too close?”.

The article includes links to the videos.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

[2] https://rodneybrooks.com/forai-steps-toward-super-intelligen...