A Potentially More Humane Way to Let the Machines In
Published on Jan 17, 2022
Read more about Hume AI and The Hume Initiative in The Washington Post.
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Are emotional expressions universal?
Do people around the world express themselves in the same way? Does a smile mean the same thing worldwide? And how about a chuckle, a sigh, or a grimace? These questions about the cross-cultural universality of expressions are among the more important and long-standing in behavioral sciences like psychology and anthropology—and central to the study of emotion.
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For AI to enhance our emotional well-being and engage with us meaningfully, it needs to understand the way we express ourselves and respond appropriately. This capability lies at the heart of a field of AI research that focuses on machine learning models capable of identifying and categorizing emotion-related behaviors. However, this area of research is frequently misunderstood, often sensationalized under the umbrella term "emotion AI"--AI that can “detect” emotions, an impossible form of mind-reading.