Artificial intelligence could one day get out of control. At least that’s what many doomsayers think about artificial intelligence. While some worry about the dangers that artificial intelligence poses to humanity, others will undoubtedly be excited about a new advancement: artificial intelligence that can read minds.
AI that can read your mind is complete nonsense, right? Pure science fiction! Well, not exactly. According to a new study by a team of researchers, a new AI could be able to recreate the things you think about, and with surprising accuracy.
Mind-reading AI doesn’t actually read your mind in the moment. Instead, it looks at recordings of your brain activity and then uses the markers in them to recreate images of what it thinks you were looking at.
According to the researchers, the results were greatly improved when the AI learned which parts of the brain to pay attention to. To test the AI, the researchers first used functional MRI (fMRI) to record the brain activity of three people, who were shown a series of photographs.
They then fed these recordings to the mind-reading AI to see how well it could recreate the images shown to people. In this particular study, the results were stunningly accurate. Of course, the results also showed that it is much easier for AI to recreate images generated by AI than images that were not generated by AI.
This likely has something to do with the algorithms that AI systems use to create the images in the first place. The researchers have made their findings available on the preprint server bioRxiv.
