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Amazon’s A.I. Emotion-Recognition Software Confuses Expressions for Feelings
People’s faces say a lot less about their emotions than companies think
In August, Amazon announced it had improved “accuracy for emotion detection” in its facial-recognition software. Not only could the technology better detect seven emotions (happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm, and confused), the company explained, but it could for the first time detect an eighth emotion: fear.
Major tech companies like Microsoft and Apple, along with startups like Kairos and Affectiva, sell similar emotion-detecting products. This relatively new service category is, by one estimate, projected to become a $25 billion industry by 2023.
Technology that reads emotions based only on facial expressions would be an astonishing breakthrough. It could, for instance, allow marketers to survey viewers’ reactions to horror movies, built-in car software to assess whether a driver is angry or drowsy, and companies to weed out bored or uninterested job candidates. It might even help children with autism learn to recognize others’ emotions. But in recent months, scientists have raised considerable doubt that using faces to read emotions is even possible.
The problem isn’t that technology like…
