AI Can’t detect Emotions from Facial Expressions

It is recently found that AI can’t detect emotions from facial expressions. Researchers found that people could use similar expressions to portray different emotions. Nowadays, Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are being developed to infer people’s intentions and reactions. This is done by studying their facial expressions. But a new study says that such speculations by AI cannot be very reliable.

Study

A recent study analyzed photos of actors to examine the relation between facial expressions and human emotions. They found that people could use similar expressions to portray different emotions. As in, the same emotion could be expressed in different ways. The research also found that much of the inference is dependent on context. So, to judge people’s inner thoughts simply by analyzing their facial expressions through an algorithm can be a faulty method.

Researchers marked 13 emotion categories under which they analyzed facial expressions from 604 photographs of professional actors. The actors were given emotion-evoking scenarios to which they would have to react. However, the portrayals did not suggest in any way what to feel about these scenarios.

Publication

The study was published in Nature Communications, in which 13 categories were made through the judgment of 839 volunteers and the Facial Action Coding System that relates certain action units to certain movements of facial muscles. Machine learning (ML) analysis revealed to researchers that actors portrayed the same emotion categories by contouring their faces in different ways. At the same time, similar expressions did not always reveal the same emotions.

The researchers also wrote that these findings join other recent summaries of the empirical evidence to suggest that scowls, smiles, and other facial configurations belong to a larger, more variable repertoire of the meaningful ways in which people move their faces to express emotion.

A few months ago, a researcher sought regulations on AI tools being pushed in schools and workplaces to interpret human emotions.

Kate Crawford, academic-researcher and the author of the book “The Atlas of AI”,  said that unverified systems were used to interpret inner states. Also added that such technology needs to be regulated for better policy-making and public trust.

Conclusion

What are your thoughts regarding this? Do you think that Artificial Intelligence has the power to synchronize with a human brain, or are there some limits?

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