Microsoft to drop some controversial facial recognition features

Microsoft is gradually banning public use of some artificial intelligence facial analysis tools, including one that claims to be able to identify subjects' emotions from videos and pictures.

This "emotion recognition" tool has been criticized by experts. They say it's widely believed that facial expressions differ among different people, and that it's unscientific to equate outward displays of emotion with inner feelings. Because a machine can detect a scowl, but that's not the same thing as detecting anger.

This decision is part of a major overhaul of Microsoft's artificial intelligence ethics policy. The company's updated standards for responsible AI, first proposed in 2019, emphasize accountability to find out who uses its services and increase human oversight of where these tools are used.

In practical terms, this means Microsoft will limit access to some features of its facial recognition service, known as Azure Face, and remove others entirely. Users must apply to use Azure Face for facial recognition, for example, by telling Microsoft how and where they will deploy their system. Some less harmful use cases, such as automatic blurring of faces in images and videos, will remain open access.

In addition to removing public access to its emotion recognition tools, Microsoft has also removed Azure Face's ability to identify "attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup."

Natasha Crampton, Microsoft's chief AI lead, wrote in a blog post announcing the news: "Experts inside and outside the company have stressed the need for 'emotions' There is a lack of scientific consensus on the definition, challenges in how to extrapolate across use cases, geographies, and demographics, and heightened privacy concerns around such capabilities."

Starting June 21, Microsoft will stop providing These features are available to new users, while access to existing users will be revoked on June 30, 2023.

Some of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence applications will still offer emotion recognition.

Although Microsoft will no longer make these features available to the public, it will continue to use them in at least one of its products: an app called Seeing AI that uses machine vision to provide visual aids for the visually impaired Provide people with new abilities to "see" the world.

Sarah Bird, product manager on Microsoft’s main Azure AI team, said tools like emotion recognition “are valuable when used in accessibility-controlled scenarios.” It's unclear whether these tools will be used in other Microsoft products.

Microsoft has also introduced similar restrictions on its Custom Neural Voice feature, which allows customers to create artificial intelligence voices based on recordings of real people (sometimes called deepfake audio).

The tool "has exciting potential for education, accessibility, and entertainment," but Bird also noted that "it can also be easily used to inappropriately impersonate speakers and deceive listeners." Microsoft says it will limit access to the feature to "managing customers and partners" in the future and "ensure the active participation of the original speaker when creating synthesized speech."

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