arXiv:2606.31442cs.AI2026-06

情绪AI无法确定个体情绪意义,最终解释权应归体验者本人。

Who Determines the Meaning of an Emotion? Affective Sovereignty as an Epistemic Consequence of Measurement Limits

论文配图:Who Determines the Meaning of an Emotion? Affective Sovereignty as an Epistemic Consequence of Measurement Limits
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 从测量局限出发,分析情绪标注的可还原与不可还原误差
  • 个体情绪意义的不可估量性导致认知鸿沟,设备高置信度不等于真相
  • 提出情绪主权原则:情绪解释权应归属感受者自身

情绪感知AI正嵌入车辆、家用电器、对话系统与社会基础设施中,形成一个将情绪置于社会层面观测与计算的新领域,称为‘情感圈’(Affectosphere)。然而,这一领域中一个核心规范问题长期被忽视:谁有最终权威来界定个人情绪的意义?本文从测量的结构性限制出发,定义‘意义分布’为在固定标注协议下,从人群中抽样标注者对情绪标签的分配分布,并将其不确定性分解为可还原与不可还原部分。研究发现,尽管情绪AI可在群体层面实现高置信度标注与差异判别,但在真实标注者数量下,个体实例的不可还原部分无法获得充分覆盖,这种系统性偏差被称为‘认知鸿沟’。关键结论是:设备高置信度不能证明不可恢复的意义已被获取。结合明确的规范前提——原则上无法恢复的量不应被视为其权威判定——推导出规范结论:个体情绪意义的最终解释权应程序性地保留给体验主体,即‘情绪主权’。该结果表明,情绪AI的设计、评估与监管应以解释权的明确分配为核心,而非单纯追求准确率最大化。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Emotion-sensing AI is rapidly becoming embedded in vehicles, home appliances, dialogue agents, and social infrastructure, giving rise to a sphere in which emotion is no longer confined to individual experience but is instead observed and computed at a societal scale, a domain we term the Affectosphere. Yet a central normative question in this domain has remained underexplored: who has the final authority to determine the meaning of one's own emotion? This study addresses the question from the epistemological side of measurement's structural limits. We define a meaning distribution as the distribution of labels assigned by annotators drawn from a population under a fixed annotation protocol, and decompose its uncertainty into reducible and irreducible components. We then demonstrate that, while emotion AI can assign high-confidence point labels and discriminate real differences at an aggregate level, the irreducible component of the meaning distribution for individual instances cannot be estimated with adequate coverage under realistic annotator counts, a systematic divergence we term the epistemic gap. The key finding is that high device confidence does not constitute evidence that irrecoverable meaning has been recovered. From this epistemic gap, together with an explicitly stated normative premise, namely that the output of a system which cannot recover a quantity in principle must not be treated as its authoritative determination, we derive the norm that the final interpretive authority over the meaning of one's emotion is procedurally reserved for the experiencing subject, the norm of affective sovereignty. These results suggest that the design, evaluation, and regulation of emotion AI should place explicit allocation of interpretive authority, rather than accuracy maximisation, at their core.

情绪识别伦理规范认知鸿沟主权设计

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