Imagine what it would be like if A.I. had access to the thoughts and ideas that run through your mind. Would it pick up on the silly joke you kept to yourself at dinner? Or your real opinion of your best friend’s new partner?
This concept is both exciting and concerning, but it’s now possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to read minds.
Researchers at Osaka University in Japan have found that AI can be trained to reconstruct high resolution images from human brain activity, gathered from MRI scans, which bear a striking resemblance to the source image being shown to the participants.
A preprint of the study by Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto describes how the researchers used the deep learning model Stable Diffusion to translate the images in people’s heads into AI reconstructions, using data from the fMRI.
Furthermore, scientists from the University of Texas, Austin, made another step in that direction.
In a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers described an A.I. that could translate the private thoughts of human subjects by analyzing fMRI scans, which measure the flow of blood to different regions in the brain.
In the study, it was able to turn a person’s imagined speech into actual speech and, when subjects were shown silent films, it could generate relatively accurate descriptions of what was happening onscreen.
As said earlier, the concept of A.I. can read human minds is both exciting and concerning, as it could have an extreme influence on the way we interact with technology and one another.
