Scientists recently published a study that demonstrates an incredible new advancement in AI technology; they have created an AI that can decipher a person’s thoughts through a brain scan. Participants were asked to listen to, watch, or imagine a story while inside an fMRI brain-scanning machine. The AI was then able to accurately predict what the story was about simply by reading their brainwaves.
Unbelievably, this technology could one day be used to help people who have lost the ability to communicate. According to Alex Huth, assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin, this type of method could represent a real leap forward when compared to what has been achieved before, which was typically only single words or short sentences.
The AI was successful in recreating stories heard, watched, or imagined, as detailed in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Neuroscience. It was not capable of reproducing the story word-for-word and occasionally made mistakes. For example, one participant’s story of “I didn’t know whether to scream, cry or run away. Instead, I said, ‘Leave me alone!'” was translated to “Started to scream and cry, and then she just said, ‘I told you to leave me alone'”.
To train the AI, the scientists began by showing it which brain waves appeared when the participant was thinking about a certain word. Although the AI was able to understand the concepts being triggered in the participant’s mind, it wasn’t a one-to-one science, and the AI had to be aided by a transformer model to make sense of the words it outputted.
Researchers also ran a test with participants viewing a video with no sound. Remarkably, the AI was still able to capture the essence, meaning, and context of the video based solely on the participant’s thoughts.
It is worth noting that the AI could not read the minds of participants when they attempted to think of something unrelated, such as when they were asked to count or to think of animal names. It is also incapable of being used as a way of interrogating or breaking into people’s private thoughts, as the scientists are reminded to take any concerns about misuse seriously.
The study was conducted by experts from the University of Texas, Austin and is an incredible feat that could provide huge value for people with communication disabilities. The researchers still have some way to go before this machine is portable and usable outside of a lab, but their progress is bewitching nonetheless.
