Microsoft is reviewing its ethical policies for artificial intelligence and will no longer allow companies to use its technology to do things like bring out emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company said.
As part of its new “responsible AI standard,” Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the heart of system design decisions.” High-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company said, with some features adjusted and others withdrawn from sale.
Microsoft’s Azure Face service, for example, is a face recognition tool used by companies like Uber as part of their authentication processes. Now, any company that wants to use the features of the facial recognition service will have to actively apply for use, including those who have already built it into their products, to prove that they meet Microsoft’s ethical standards for artificial intelligence and that the functions are beneficial to the end user and society.
Even companies that have been granted access will no longer be able to use some of Azure Face’s more controversial features, Microsoft said, and the company will withdraw facial analysis technology that claims to display emotional states and attributes such as gender or age.
“We’ve worked with internal and external researchers to understand the limitations and potential benefits of this technology and to focus on trade-offs,” said Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s product manager. “Especially in the case of the classification of emotions, these efforts have raised important questions about confidentiality, the lack of consensus on the definition of ’emotions’ and the inability to summarize the relationship between facial expression and emotional state in different uses.”
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Microsoft is not completely eliminating emotion recognition – the company will still use it internally, for accessibility tools like Seeing AI, which try to verbally describe the world to visually impaired users.
Similarly, the company has limited the use of its custom neural voice technology, which allows the creation of synthetic voices that sound almost identical to the original source. “It’s easy to imagine how it can be used to misrepresent speakers and deceive listeners,” said Natasha Crampton, AI’s chief executive officer.
Earlier this year, Microsoft began watermarking its synthetic voices, including minor, unheard-of fluctuations in output, which meant the company could tell when a recording was made using its technology. “With the advancement of neural TTS technology, which makes synthetic speech indistinguishable from human voices, there is a risk of harmful deep counterfeiting,” said Qing Liao of Microsoft.
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