CAREER: Emotion Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Work: A Privacy and Relational Ethics Lens

Emotion artificial intelligence (AI) aims to infer people's emotions and mood in mundane and high-stakes contexts. Despite validity, bias, and privacy concerns, emotion AI continues to be developed and used in consequential ways, such as in employment interviews, without informed public input. We lack empirical knowledge about the benefits and harms it can inflict on people's privacy and lives. This project investigates emotion AI’s ethical and privacy implications in two high-stakes contexts--the workplace and hiring interviews. The project will describe how emotion AI is used and how people may be affected by it. The project has policy implications addressing this technology’s impact on workers and job seekers, and therefore the future of work. Additionally, this research leads to guidelines to be used by emotion AI creators and decision-makers, and improves public knowledge of emotion AI’s use and implications. This project investigates how emotion AI is perceived and experienced by job seekers and employees and how it is used by decision-makers who apply the inferences it generates. First, the project uses a mixed-methods approach including interviews using the story completion method and factorial vignette surveys. Participants in these studies include marginalized employees and job seekers at more risk of emotion AI harm. Second, the project includes interviews and an experiment with decision-makers to examine how emotion AI may be used by them. This research will contribute to emotion AI/AI ethics, privacy, future of work, and affective computing scholarship. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.