AI Prof Sounds Alarm: AI "Emotion Detectors" Are Faulty Science

Kate Crawford (pictured), a principal researcher at Microsoft, and author of Atlas of AI (2021), is warning at Nature that the COVID-19 pandemic "is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools." The software is touted as able to read the "six basic emotions" via analysis of facial expressions: During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children's emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil's emotional state into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. It also gauges'motivation' and forecasts grades.