Emotion AI is a newly coined term for generative artificial intelligence systems that mimic, learn, or capture human emotions.
Businesses are rapidly expanding their integration with Artificial Intelligence to improve operational efficiency, customer engagement, and business insights. One side that is still left either undeveloped or underdeveloped is emotional Artificial Intelligence. This side of AI is termed Emotion AI, where understanding human emotions, mimicking them, or generating such is considered a core capability.
The big tech players say that achieving this feat is still a long journey as both the development and limitation of this technology are lacking. AI can, at max, generate output from loads of mass data used for their training, but emotions are like fingerprints that make them unique in almost every interaction.
However, AI cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon provide emotion-based AI capabilities through Microsoft Azure cognitive services’ Emotion API or Amazon Web Services’ Rekognition service. Both services have been a part of global controversies due to their claims.
“With the proliferation of AI assistants and fully automated human-machine interactions, emotion AI promises to enable more human-like interpretations and responses,” said PitchBook’s Derek Hernandez, a senior analyst of emerging technologies.
Emotion AI is supposed to be an upgraded cousin of Sentiment Analysis, a pre-AI technology that distills human emotion from textual interactions, visual movements, audio signals, and more. The technology failed miserably over the years, and after billions in research investments, many global regulators have put a strict ban on visual motion detection.
The problem of an Emotion AI breakthrough for businesses would encompass instability in the human resource space. If emotionally capable AI chatbots take over front-end jobs, customer service, and marketing executive roles, most of the humans in these roles will become redundant. A potential low-wage and executive-level unemployment surge will walk the earth as emotional AI bots emerge.
Another negative aspect with high probability is the anomaly of AI chatbots being inaccurate, delusional, or simply wrong in their output. On a conscience level, emotional artificial intelligence is what humanity has always been afraid of. All the movies that showed AI taking over the world revolve around sentience, something only humans have acquired on Earth. Unless this level of tech advancement is achieved, emotion AI will not be of much use. If it does get achieved, the risks associated with it may not have any upper threshold.
