Affective Sovereignty in the Age of Emotional AI: Reclaiming the Right to Feel

As emotional AI systems gain interpretive authority over human affect, a critical ethicalquestion emerges: who retains the right to define what we feel? This paper introducesAffective Sovereignty as an ethical imperative in the age of emotional AI. We argue thatsystems like Replika and Affectiva, which read and label human emotions, risk uniquenessviolations—flattening personal, context-rich feelings into algorithmic generalities. Drawingon philosophy, psychology, and real-world applications, we show how such systems not onlymisinterpret emotions but also displace the human as the primary interpreter of their owninner life. To safeguard emotional autonomy, we propose a four-principle design framework:(1) Interpretive Transparency, (2) Design Restraint, and (3) Identity-ResponsiveFeedback. This work is a philosophical and practical intervention to ensure that emotion AIamplifies human understanding rather than replacing it.This paper presents the first ethical framework on affective sovereignty originating fromKorea—a conceptual declaration aimed at reclaiming emotional interpretation rights in theage of AI. We envision this as not merely a technical intervention, but a moral stanceinitiated from the Korean academic frontier to the global AI community.