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Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried

Google is releasing a new open model family, PaliGemma 2. Experts are concerned about its emotion recognition capabilities.

“PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images,” Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, “going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene.” The biggest apprehension around open models like PaliGemma 2, which is available from a number of hosts including AI dev platform Hugging Face, is that they’ll be abused or misused, which could lead to real-world harm. “If this so-called ’emotional identification’ is built on pseudoscientific presumptions, there are significant implications in how this capability may be used to further — and falsely — discriminate against marginalized groups such as in law enforcement, human resourcing, border governance, and so on,” Khlaaf said.

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