On 14 March 2024, Dr. Luke Stark (FIMS, Western) gave a guest talked to an audience of graduate students in Dr. Rubin’s Winter 2024 course (on Misinformation & Viral Deception (FIMS9328)). Dr. Stark’s talk was entitled “Emotion AI and the Roots of Social Media Disinformation: Scenes from the History of Affective Computing.” Lots of interesting connections were made and much appreciated by the audience!

Abstract: In fields ranging from health and wellness and advertising and marketing to public safety and security, and political campaigning, data analytics tools united with techniques from the psychological and behavioral sciences are being deployed in real-world application defining, tracking, measuring, and modulating our moods, feelings, and physical affective responses.  

Scandals like the 2014 Facebook “emotional contagion” study and the “psychographic profiling” of Trump campaign contractor Cambridge Analytica have brought these technologies into public consciousness. In this talk, I connect the historical treatment of human emotion by computer science to parallel wider debates within psychology, psychology, and cognitive science from late 1940s up to the present, examining how the genealogy of cybernetic technologies for emotion measurement and tracking shaped the slow growth of affective computing as an organized field in the 2000s and its speedy growth today. In doing so, I connect elite debates in the early days of computing around the best way to manage social disorder with today’s reliance on digital technologies to manage and modulate individuals and populations using AI systems.