Abstract:

Emotion AI, increasingly used in mundane (e.g., entertainment) to high-stakes (e.g., education, healthcare, workplace) contexts, refers to technologies that claim to algorithmically recognize, detect, predict, and infer emotions, emotional states, moods, and even mental health status using a wide range of input data. While emotion AI is critiqued for associated scientific validity, bias, and surveillance concerns, it continues to be patented, developed, and used without public debate, resistance, or regulation.

In this talk, I highlight some of my research group’s work focusing on the workplace to discuss: 1) how emotion AI technologies are conceived of by their inventors and what values are embedded in their design, and 2) the perspectives of the humans who produce the data that make emotion AI possible, and whose experiences are shaped by these technologies: data subjects. I argue that emotion AI is not just technical, it is sociotechnical, political, and enacts/shifts power. I show how emotion AI could harm the very conditions its advocates promise it will improve (e.g., worker wellbeing, work conditions), rendering it a problematic choice for addressing structural challenges workers face in the workplace. I conclude that even with technical reforms (e.g., reducing biases, improving accuracy) many emotion AI-inflicted harms (e.g., emotional labor, privacy harms) would persist.

Bio:

Nazanin Andalibi is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and is an affiliate faculty member at the university’s Digital Studies Institute; Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing; and Center for Social Media Responsibility. As a social computing and human-computer interaction (HCI) scholar, her research examines how marginality is experienced, enacted, facilitated, or disrupted in and as mediated through sociotechnical systems such as artificial intelligence and social media. For example, a central theme of her research examines the privacy, ethical, justice, and policy implications of emotion AI technologies in high-stakes contexts including the workplace, job interviews, social media, and health care.