Artificial intelligence could eventually help us understand pain or other emotions in animals, at least that's what researchers recently reported in Science magazine think. For example, scientists at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland's Rural College are developing the Intellipig system, which examines photos of pig faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, illness or emotional distress.

Facial recognition software developed by a team at the University of Haifa is already being used to help people find lost dogs, and now they are training artificial intelligence to recognize signs of distress on the animals' faces.

These systems rely on humans to do the initial work of identifying the meaning of different animal behaviors (often based on long-term observations of animals in various situations) so that humans can train the AI ​​to look for what to look for.

However, a researcher at the University of São Paulo has tried using photos of horses' faces before and after surgery and before and after taking painkillers to let an artificial intelligence system use deep learning to judge on its own what signs might indicate pain, with a success rate of 88% in a recent study.