New AI tools purport to be able to identify human emotion in images and speech patterns. How it works: Emotion recognition software is meant to do just that -- use decades-old psychological research about how humans express emotions and recognize it in image, video or even in speech. A multidisciplinary team led by University of Cambridge professor Alexa Hagerty recently produced the Emojify Project, which allows users on the web to try out emotion recognition tech for themselves. What they're saying: In a piece published earlier this week in Nature, AI ethicist Kate Crawford argued the technology should be regulated because it can draw "faulty assumptions about internal states and capabilities from external appearances, with the aim of extracting more about a person than they choose to reveal." Last week my Axios colleague Ina Fried broke a story about a digital civil rights group asking Spotify to abandon a technology it has patented to detect emotion, gender and age using speech recognition.

Emotion recognition is a branch of artificial intelligence that aims at identifying emotion in human faces. In the last decade, it has seen increased interest both in academia and the industry, and the market is expected to grow to $85 billion by 2025. It has several applications, most of them at the very least ethically questionable. It allows employers to evaluate potential employees by scoring them on empathy or emotional intelligence, among other traits. It helps teachers remotely monitor students' engagement in schools or while they do classwork at home.

Identifying what someone is feeling or even anticipating potential reactions based on nonverbal behavioral cues is no longer a problem reserved for sensitive and astute people. With the advancement of cutting-edge technologies in emotional intelligence, this capability gains new dimensions with the capability of machines recognizing human emotions for a variety of purposes. Complex facial detection algorithms are now powerful enough to analyze and measure emotions captured in real-world situations. They are so powerful that we are reaching a point that some ethical aspects have been raised. Emotion Recognition is based on facial expression recognition, a computer-based technology that employs algorithms to detect faces, code facial expressions, and recognize emotional states in real-time.

It is a technology that has been frowned upon by ethicists: now researchers are hoping to unmask the reality of emotion recognition systems in an effort to boost public debate. Technology designed to identify human emotions using machine learning algorithms is a huge industry, with claims it could prove valuable in myriad situations, from road safety to market research. But critics say the technology not only raises privacy concerns, but is inaccurate and racially biased. A team of researchers have created a website – emojify.info One game focuses on pulling faces to trick the technology, while another explores how such systems can struggle to read facial expressions in context. Their hope, the researchers say, is to raise awareness of the technology and promote conversations about its use.