“We have improved accuracy for emotion detection — for all seven emotions: ‘Happy,’ ‘Sad,’ ‘Angry,’ ‘Surprised,’ ‘Disgusted,’ ‘Calm,’ and ‘Confused’ — and added a new emotion: ‘Fear,’” the company said. Among other accuracy and functionality enhancements, the retail giant has made updates to its facial analysis tool and improved the accuracy of identifying genders.
The facial recognition debate
While fear could be leveraged for practical security use cases, reading a person’s emotions by their facial features risks mistakenly branding innocents as criminals, not to mention the potential for discriminatory and racial biases. After all, a machine learning software can only be as good as the data it learns from. The development comes as facial recognition tech has been the subject of a growing debate among civil liberty groups and lawmakers, who have raised concerns related to false matches and arrests while balancing the need for public safety. The question is not whether the software’s technical problems are solvable. The question is whether can we trust organizations — counting governments — to apply facial recognition responsibly. Rekognition has attracted further scrutiny owing to its use by law enforcement agencies in the US, which have led to some police departments worry that its usage would pose surveillance concerns. “Even though our software is being used to identify persons of interest from images provided to the [sheriff’s office], the perception might be that we are constantly checking faces from everything, kind of a Big Brother vibe,” per emails from Oregon police officials. Reiterating the utility of such AI-based tools in the real world, it has said, “Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology.”
