AI might now be as good as humans at detecting emotion, political leaning, sarcasm in online conversations

When we write something to another person, over email or perhaps on social media, we may not state things directly, but our words may instead convey a latent meaning – an underlying subtext. We also often hope that this meaning will come through to the reader.

But what happens if an artificial intelligence (AI) system is at the other end, rather than a person? Can AI, especially conversational AI, understand the latent meaning in our text? And if so, what does this mean for us?

Latent content analysis is an area of study concerned with uncovering the…