GabyA team of scientists from Osaka University says AI can read signals from our brains and convert them into images.
For several years, researchers have been training Stable Diffusion, an artificial intelligence tool, to reconstruct visual images from human brain activity. The images generated by the AI from fMRI scans bear a striking resemblance to the original pictures participants saw.
“Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used for mapping brain activity, observing tiny changes in blood flow that indicate activity in certain parts of the brain,” Joseph Erli, a PhD student in artificial intelligence at the Alan Turing Institute (United Kingdom), reminded.
As the study authors Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto explained, during fMRI scans each participant was shown 10,000 photos of various objects. The brain responses were sent to a computer, and Stable Diffusion read and reconstructed the data.
The AI decoded some people’s brain activity better than others. Despite this variability, in most cases the reconstructed images resembled the pictures participants saw. Just take a look at the photo illustration, where the top row contains the originals the participants saw, and the bottom row shows the AI reconstructions.
During the study, the AI was able to recreate what the participants saw by analyzing their brain activity. The team says that, in theory, this method could be used to gather images directly from a person’s imagination. However, it’s still unclear exactly how brain activity could be decoded.
They also say the technology could help develop brain–machine interfaces to assist patients with vision loss and other brain disorders.
What about reading thoughts that most people don’t want to share with anyone, including AI? The team points out that deploying this technology outside a lab would be labor-intensive and expensive. The need to personalize the system for each person also makes mind-reading difficult.
So for now, there’s no need to worry about hiding your secret thoughts from AI or other people.
Still, given the rapid pace of development, it’s possible that intelligent machines could read thoughts in the future. That would be a deeply unwelcome gift for humanity.
