Zoom AI Push Advocacy Group Criticizes Plan Emotion AI

An Advocacy Group Criticizes Zoom’s Proposed Emotion AI

Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing platform that is used globally for video conference meetings. It is in fact, one of the world’s largest video communication platforms and this is because Zoom keeps developing impressive features that make it stand tall as a video conferencing platform.

 

What Zoom Wants To Achieve With Emotion AI

In a bid to improve its user experience and satisfaction, zoom is developing an emotional intelligence feature. This feature will allow the app to collect facial expression data to gauge emotional responses to zoom meetings so that users get feedback on the sentiments and emotions of meeting attendees.

 

Concern About Zoom Emotion AI

This proposed feature has created data security and privacy concerns. Organizations like FFTF (FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE) predict that it could be used in all sorts of ways that affect people’s everyday lives.

Fight for the Future wants Zoom to stop considering plans to incorporate controversial “emotion AI” in its services. In an open letter to Zoom management, FFTF said “We get that you’re trying to improve your platform, but mining us for emotional data points doesn’t make the world a better place,”

 

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The letter was accompanied by an online petition and it calls on Zoom to “Make the right call and cancel this crummy surveillance feature—and publicly commit to not implementing sentiment analysis in the future.” FFTF added, “But we see the writing on the wall. Ultimately, this software will be sold to schools and employers who will use it to track and discipline us.”

 

More on Emotion Artificial intelligence

Emotion AI uses computer vision and facial recognition, speech recognition, natural-language processing, and other AI technologies to capture data representing someone’s external expressions in an effort to detect the internal emotions or feelings they indicate.
Despite criticism around the legitimacy of emotion AI, it is finding its way into everyday tech products and generating investor interest. One company that currently offers software used by sales reps incorporating emotion AI features, Uniphore, recently collected $400 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $2.5 billion.

About Fight For The Future

Fight for the Future is a nonprofit advocacy group in the area of digital rights founded in 2011. The group aims to promote causes related to copyright legislation, as well as online privacy and censorship through the use of the Internet. combines creativity with technology to make viral, unexpected, cultural moments that bring millions of people together to fight for their basic rights.

 

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In 2021, they made headway in the fight against Amazon’s surveillance empire with campaigns to end workplace surveillance at Amazon, helping to break the story at CNBC on Amazon’s vans turning into mobile surveillance machines that simultaneously survey drivers and the neighborhoods they drove through.

Some of the great feats they’ve achieved include stopping palm scanning, and facial recognition at music festivals as well as advocating for the need to ensure that policies respect the rights of young people to use social media to connect, find support, and organize to change their world.

The Credibility of Emotion Artificial Intelligence

In a 2021 article published in ‘The Atlantic’, Kate Crawford, an AI ethics scholar, research professor at USC Annenberg, and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, cited a 2019 research paper that stated that,“The claim that a person’s interior state can be accurately assessed by analyzing that person’s face is premised on shaky evidence,”

She went on to state that “The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation.”