Scientists can now read your MIND: AI turns people’s thoughts into text in real-time
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Mind-reading technology can now transcribe people’s thoughts in real time based on the blood flow in their brains.
One study put three people in MRI machines and had them listen to stories.
For the first time, researchers claim, they produced a scrolling text of people’s thoughts, and not just single words or sentences, without using a brain implant.
The mind-reading technology didn’t exactly replicate the stories, but it captured the main points.
The breakthrough raises concerns about “mental privacy,” as eavesdropping on others’ thoughts could be the first step.
Using technology similar to ChatGPT, the technology also interpreted what people saw when they watched silent movies, or their thoughts as they imagined telling a story.
Researchers found they could read a person’s mind with about 50 percent accuracy by using a new MRI scanning method. They would expose a patient to hours of podcasts to see how their brains would react to different words, then use the scan to determine
The brain responds to different words using electrical signals and blood flow. Researchers built an AI model that can read those responses and translate them into writing (file photo)
But the researchers point out that it took 16 hours of training, listening to podcasts in an MRI machine, for the computer model to understand their brain patterns and interpret what they were thinking.
Humans were also able to “sabotage” the technology, using methods such as mentally enumerating the names of animals to prevent it from reading their minds.
Jerry Tang, lead author of the study from the University of Texas at Austin, said he couldn’t prove a “false sense of security” that the technology wouldn’t have the potential to eavesdrop on people’s thoughts in the future. now abused.
But he said: ‘We take very seriously the concern that it could be used for bad purposes.
And we want to spend a lot of time moving forward to try to avoid that.
“I think right now, when the technology is still in such an early stage, it’s important to be proactive and take the lead by, for example, establishing policies that protect people’s mental privacy, entitle people to their thoughts and their brain data.
“We want to make sure people use it only when they want to, and that it helps them.
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Silicon Valley is very interested in mind-reading technology, which will one day allow people to type just by thinking the words they want to communicate.
Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, is working on a brain implant that could provide direct communication with computers.
But the new technology is relatively unusual in its field, reading minds without the use of a brain implant, eliminating the need for surgery.
While it currently requires a bulky, expensive MRI machine, in the future people will be able to wear patches on their heads that use light waves to penetrate the brain and provide information about blood flow.
This allows people’s thoughts to be detected as they move.
The new study, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, used a “decoder,” which contains both a computer model to interpret people’s brain activity and language processing technology similar to ChatGPT to help generate potential words.
After hours of training, the decoder was able to pick up on what people were thinking about half the time.
That meant it produced text that closely, and sometimes exactly, matched the words people listened to – this was worked out using just their brain activity.
For example, a person listening to a speaker say “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” translated his thoughts as “she hasn’t even started learning to drive yet.”
The researchers say the breakthrough could help people who are mentally aware but unable to speak, such as stroke victims or those with motor neuron disease.
Unlike other mind-reading technology, it works when people think of every word, not just the one in a setlist – although it struggles with pronouns like “he” and “me”.
It detects activity in language-forming brain regions, unlike other similar technology that typically detects how someone imagines moving their mouth to form specific words.
Dr. Alexander Huth, senior author of the study from the University of Texas at Austin, said: “We were quite shocked that this worked as well as it does.
“This is a problem I’ve been working on for 15 years.”
He added: ‘For a non-invasive method, this is a real leap forward from what has been done before, which is usually single words or short sentences.’
On concerns that the technology could be used on someone without them knowing, such as by an authoritarian regime interrogating political prisoners or an employer spying on employees, the researchers say the system can only read an individual’s mind after it is trained in their thinking patterns. , so could not be secretly applied to anyone.
Dr. Huth said, “If people don’t want something decoded from their brains, they can control it using just their cognition — they can think of other things, and then it all goes wrong.”