Artificial intelligence still lags behind humans at recognising emotions

When it comes to reading emotions on people's faces, artificial intelligence still lags behind human observers, according to a new study involving UCL. The difference was particularly pronounced when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, according to the findings published in PLOS One. The research team, led by Dublin City University, looked at eight "out of the box" automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition (artificial intelligence that can identify human emotions on faces) and compared their emotion recognition performance to that of human observers. The researchers found found that the human recognition accuracy of emotions was 72% whereas among the artificial intelligence tested, the researchers observed a variance in recognition accuracy, ranging from 48% to 62%. Lead author Dr Damien Dupré (Dublin City University) said: "AI systems claiming to recognise humans' emotions from their facial expressions are now very easy to develop. However, most of them are based on inconclusive scientific evidence that people are expressing emotions in the same way. "For these systems, human emotions come down to only six basic emotions, but they do not cope well with blended emotions.