AI can read your emotions. Should it?

Advertisers, tech giants and border forces are using face tracking software to monitor our moods - whether we like it or not

It is early July, almost 30C outside, but Mihkel Jiitma is thinking about Christmas. In a co-working space in Soho, the 39-year-old founder and CEO of Realeyes, an "emotion AI" startup which uses eye-tracking and facial expression to analyse mood, scrolls through a list of 20 festive ads from 2018. He settles on The Boy and the Piano, the offering from John Lewis that tells the life story of Elton John backwards, from megastardom to the gift of a piano from his parents as a child, accompanied by his timeless heartstring-puller Your Song. The ad was well received, but Jiitma is clearly unconvinced.

He hits play, and the ad starts, but this time two lines - one grey (negative reactions), the other red (positive) - are traced across the action. These follow the second-by-second responses of a 200-person sample audience who watched the ad and allowed Realeyes to record them through the camera of their computer or smartphone. Realeyes then used its AI technology to analyse each individual's facial expression and body language. The company did this with all of Jiitma's list of 20 Christmas ads from 2018, watching 4,000 people, before rating each commercial for attention, emotion, sentiment and finally giving it a mark out of 10.