Ethics of Emotion AI — Part 1

Ethics. AI. These aren’t just fodder for late-night musings. Machine learning is fuelling a fourth industrial revolution. Put that fuel in an engine, and we can power great change. Leave it to spread unchecked, and all it takes is one spark for everything to go up in flames. Fuel needs direction; AI needs ethics.

This blog series was inspired by a panel on which I sat at CogX conference. Here, we discussed the ethical implications of a rapidly-growing subcategory of AI: ‘Emotion AI’ or ‘Affective Computing’. This involves using machine learning for the automatic prediction of human emotion. Sound potentially unethical? Good. Let’s discuss.

This post will cover:

• Where is Emotion AI Today?
• Unethical Applications of Emotion AI
• Ethical Applications of Emotion AI
• Protecting the User

Where is Emotion AI Today?

Pretty far along actually. It’s been going for around 25 years in its modern form, kick-started by a seminal paper from Rosalind Picard.

Facial Analysis

Computer vision is probably the most common method of emotion recognition. Deep neural networks (especially convolutional ones) are particularly good at tracking facial landmarks, allowing them to distinguish between a smile and a frown. Some companies claim their algorithms can recognise a suspiciously wide array of different emotions, but…