As AI-based software can make human emotions more common, a new browser game seeks to illustrate the limits of technology. Marked by , the Emojify project was created by a leader by Cambridge University professor Alexa Hagerty. You find it over. It will ask you to look at your computer’s webcam and produce six different emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger. While playing the game, you will notice that it is easy to deceive the software. For example, you can fake a smile to make you think you are happy. Ultimately, that’s the point of the experience.
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What the game is trying to achieve is that there is often a disconnect between the emotions we experience internally and the face we show to the world. Think, for example, of when someone cries. In most situations they will do it because they are sad, but it is also known that people shed tears of joy. People are messy and complicated, and we all experience emotions differently. If you suggest that it is possible to distill our feeling in a given moment in a simple set of emojis, none of us do us a favor. As with, there is also the problem of racial prejudice. A found that programs like Face ++ would usually rate the faces of black men worse and more unhappy than their white counterparts, regardless of the actual expression.
And yet technology is becoming more and more common. It’s not just something you see. Organizations and governments use it for everything from screening to passport security. Even Apple at some point in space. By pointing out the shortcomings of the emotion recognition software, the project hopes to spark a conversation about its use. “Our goal is to promote the public’s understanding of these technologies and the involvement of citizens in their development and use,” the group said. “We believe that we can empower communities to promote a just and equitable society by sharing collective intelligence and perspectives on such important issues.”