‘Emotion detection’ AI is a $20 billion industry. New research says it can’t do what it claims.

In just a handful of years, the business of emotion detection — using artificial intelligence to identify how people are feeling — has moved beyond the stuff of science fiction to a $20 billion industry. Companies like IBM and Microsoft tout software that can analyze facial expressions and match them to certain emotions, a would-be superpower that companies could use to tell how customers respond to a new product or how a job candidate is feeling during an interview. But a far-reaching review of emotion research finds that the science underlying these technologies is deeply flawed.

The problem? You can’t reliably judge how someone feels from what their face is doing.

A group of scientists brought together by the Association for Psychological Science spent two years exploring this idea. After reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the five researchers concluded that the relationship between facial expression and emotion is nebulous, convoluted and far from universal.

“About 20 to 30 percent of the time, people make the expected facial expression,” such as smiling when happy, said Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, who worked on the report published earlier this month. But the rest of the time, they don’t. “They’re not moving their faces in random ways. They’re moving them in ways that are specific to the situation.”

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