EMOTIONS AND AI TECHNOLOGY

Course Description

This course examines artificial intelligence through the interconnected lenses of emotion and BEETS: Bias, Equity, Ethics, Trust, and Security. Students explore how AI systems detect, interpret, simulate, and influence human emotion, while examining how these technologies shape human experience across education, media, healthcare, work, social interaction, and everyday life. Using the BEETS framework, students critically analyze how bias enters technological systems, how equity and ethics shape design and deployment, how trust emerges through human-AI relationships, and how security affects privacy, vulnerability, and agency. Through interdisciplinary readings, case studies, discussion, hands-on exploration, and creative projects, students investigate not only what AI can do, but what its growing presence means for how humans feel, relate, decide, and live.