AI Emotion Recognition and Affective Injustice

Artificial intelligence can now recognize our emotions using algorithms that interpret our facial expressions. This technology is used to help assess an applicant’s interview performance, an individual’s potential for criminal behavior, whether a student is paying attention during an online class, and more. Assuming that such technology could reliably recognize human emotions, it nonetheless cannot assess whether an emotion is apt, which matters for how we ought to treat someone. Specifically, we argue that such uses of AI Emotion Recognition constitute affective injustice that occurs when someone’s emotions are treated unjustly. We hope to draw attention to this issue so that designers and proponents of AI Emotion Recognition recognize the principled limitations of the technology in its current state.