Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Effective emotional expression will likely play a major role in the efficacy of AI systems -- particularly those designed to support human mental health and wellbeing. This motivates our present research to better understand the alignment of AI expressed emotions with the human perception of emotions. When AI tries to express a particular emotion, how might we assess whether they are successful? To answer this question, we designed a survey to measure the alignment between emotions expressed by generative AI and human perceptions. Three generative image models (DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion v1) were used to generate 240 examples of images, each of which was based on a prompt designed to express five positive and five negative emotions across both humans and robots. 24 participants recruited from the Prolific website rated the alignment of AI-generated emotional expressions with a text prompt used to generate the emotion (i.e., "A robot expressing the emotion amusement"). The results of our evaluation suggest that generative AI models are indeed capable of producing emotional expressions that are well-aligned with a range of human emotions; however, we show that the alignment significantly depends upon the AI model used and the emotion itself. We analyze variations in the performance of these systems to identify gaps for future improvement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future AI systems designed to support mental health and wellbeing.

生成型AI系统的情感表达能力对于AI系统的有效性至关重要，特别是那些旨在支持人类心理健康的系统。本研究旨在通过设计一项调查，测量生成型AI表达的情感与人类感知的一致性，以回答AI如何成功地表达特定情感的问题。通过评估多个生成型图像模型在表达积极和消极情感方面的表现，并分析其中的性能差异，我们发现生成型AI模型能够表达出与人类情感相一致的情感表达，但这种一致性在不同AI模型和情感本身上存在显著差异，我们还对未来改进的领域进行了分析，并讨论了对于旨在支持心理健康的未来AI系统的意义。

人类对稳定扩散态v1、DALL-E 2和DALL-E 3表达的情绪的改进情感调整