There’s been another AI mind-reading breakthrough

On the left is a video clip that was shown to a group of young adult volunteers. On the right is an AI model’s attempt at literally reading the volunteers’ minds – aka recreating what they’re seeing in real-time, based on scans of their brain activity.

The psychic community is not happy with the news.

🤔 What news exactly?... That a research team in Singapore has developed a new mind-reading technique that uses AI to recreate "high-quality" video of what humans are seeing in real-time, according to a study published last Friday on the arXiv preprint server.

Here’s how it works:

• The study’s volunteers entered an fMRI to have their brains scanned over a period of 18 hours. During that time, they looked at pictures from a dataset of images – including everyday buildings, sports activities, and wildlife – for nine seconds each.
• The researchers then trained an AI model to associate the volunteers’ brain patterns with particular image features like color, shape, texture, and contextual meaning.
• Lastly, they used the AI model to recreate what volunteers saw when they were shown brand-new video clips inside the brain scanner.

And while the videos weren’t reproduced with total accuracy, the research team said their AI model consistently produced recognizable matches, and significantly outperformed all previous experiments of a similar nature.

💥 The impact: The researchers’ ultimate goal is to help people with medical conditions that make it hard for them to communicate (like full-body paralysis). Future plans include a mind-reading headband with sensors that can detect and translate the wearer’s brain activity in real-time.

🧠 Zoom out: This study represents the latest advancement in the field of… well, reading people’s minds using AI. Earlier this month, a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Neuroscience detailed a new AI system from UT Austin scientists that successfully and non-invasively translated a person’s thoughts into text for the first time ever.