Does AI have a role when it comes to emotional decisions?

Can artificial intelligence have the emotional awareness to choose the right present?

Research from Photobox Group has shown that people are putting an increasing amount of trust into artificial intelligence - even when it comes to making emotional decisions.

45 per cent of young people (16-24) expect that AI will be better than them at choosing gifts within the next two years. Almost half (48 per cent) said that they would trust technology to help create a personalised gift, compared to just 13 per cent of people aged over 55.

That said, adoption won't be completely smooth. Just over a third of respondents said that they are ‘unsure' about AI in general, especially because they believe that such systems would have difficulty coping with human emotions.

About 16 per cent believe that technology can detect emotion, rising to 27 per cent amongst 16-24 year-olds.

Work into emotional analytics has been ongoing for years, with tools like facial recognition and reaction-time testing giving some insight into what a person is feeling. However, analysing how someone feels in real-time has little bearing on how they feel about another person.

Just over 30 per cent of young people said that they had experienced anxiety when trying to find the right present, and over 40 per cent worried about knowing what the recipient would like. 29 per cent worried that they were too influenced by their own preferences.

We have some issues with describing a tool to help choose the right photo as ‘AI' - it's really more like advanced processing. True AI will be able to pull data from multiple sources to view your history with someone, how you interact with them and what they're interested in before making recommendations. That's still in the distant future, though.