Emotional AI: Legal and ethical challenges

The European Commission has presented a draft for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). This article deals with legal and ethical questions of the datafication of human emotions. In particular, it raises the question of how emotions are to be legally classified. In particular, the concept of “emotion recognition systems” in the sense of the draft Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) published by the European Commission is addressed. As it turns out, the fundamental right to freedom of thought as well as the question of the common good and human dignity become relevant in this context, especially when such systems are combined with others, such as scoring models.