How Companies Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Tell if You're Lying

Insurance company Lemonade requires customers making claims to upload a video explaining their loss. But when the upstart insurer earlier this year said on Twitter that artificial intelligence analyzes these videos for "non-verbal cues" that may suggest fraud, the company received a barrage of angry messages on social media. "There's a wide range of possible uses of digital technologies in the space," says Luke Stark, who studies the ethical and social impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning as an assistant professor at Western University in London, Ontario. "They range from the plausibly occasionally useful-but-problematic to the doesn't-work-at-all and problematic." The Lemonade episode highlights both corporate America's growing investment in detecting lying and deception and the potential backlash when details of such technology become public.