Microsoft's new emotion-detecting AI can be hilariously bad at detecting emotions

First, they taught machinesto figure out how old we are.Then, how closely related two people might be.

Now, Microsoft has launchedan algorithm designed to recognize how humans feel, simply by reading our faces and anyone who's not freaked out by itcan try thebeta version forthemselves right now.

The team behind Microsoft's Project Oxford, a set ofadvancedmachine learning technologies for developers (or "intelligent services"), announced the public beta release of its newEmotion API Wednesday morning.

"Humans have traditionally been very good at recognizing emotions on people's faces, but computers? Not so much," reads a blog postpublished toMicrosoft's website today. "That is, until now."

The post's author goes on to explain that thisemotion tool can currently be used to help computers identify eight core emotional states in photos ofhuman faces:Anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness andsurprise.

While Microsoft does not reveal which pictures (or how many of them)were used to "train" thesystem, the emotions it can recognize are said to bebased on facial expressions that are"cross-culturally and universally communicated."

Like most artificial intelligencesystems, the Emotion APIwas designed tobecome smarter as it receives more data.

That's where you come in.

Anyone with an internet connection cancurrently access the beta version of the emotiontool on Microsoft's website and upload a photo to test it out.

The computer will analyze a picture within seconds to reveal how much of each specific emotion the subject is expressing on a scale from zero to one.

A score of, say,0.900261164 in the "anger" category as shown on the above image of NHL starSidney Crosby would mean that the person photographedis roughly 90 per cent angry.

Some of the images we tested pulled a prettyaccurate reading,but others were way off.

That photo of Crosby, for example, was taken directly after he scored the gold medal-winning goal in overtime at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Was he angry? Possibly, but it stands to reason that he was probably more joyful than anything when that picture was taken.

Many of thosewho were playing with the tool todayshared similarly wonkyresults on Twitter.

Conversely, others seemedpleased with the results they got.

One clever sleuth even used the tool to find out what Mona Lisa was hiding behind her famous smile.

Neutral happiness. Thanks, computers.