Is it fiction? No. Artificial Intelligence can read minds. This Monday, a team of researchers from the University of Texas confirmed it. It is led by Jerry Tang and Alex Huth. They managed to capture the sense of thought and interpretation of the human mind through an artificial intelligence tool. There was no need to use brain implants.
The study was published in an article in the journal. Nature Neuroscience this Monday. Participants inside a scanner listened to podcasts for 15 hours to train artificial intelligence. Then, they were shown four videos.
Capturing sentences
The tool is called a “semantic decoder.” It was able to tightly describe the story of what the participant observed or imagined. This was counting for about half of the total time of the experiment.
As a sample of this, there is the sentence of one volunteer. It was, “I didn’t know whether to scream, run away, or cry; instead, leave me alone!”. The machine translated it into “she started screaming and crying. Then, she said `I told you to leave me alone.”‘ Artificial Intelligence can read minds. The semantic decoder was also able to verbalize what they were thinking.
The people who were part of the experiment listened to a podcast from the New York Times. Also monologues from a popular radio program. The Moth Radio Hour. Meanwhile, they had their brain activity scanned by fMRI scanners.
Based on GPT
The brain scanner is noninvasive, as it uses a cap filled with electrodes. It sends the information to a decoder that converts the graphs not only into complete sentences. Also into texts that reproduced with great fidelity what they had seen or heard.
“We were a little surprised that it works as well as it does. I’ve been working on this for 15 years and it was exciting when it finally worked.”, Huth stated. “It’s about the original GPT, not like the new one. [ChatGPT se apoya en la última versión de GPT, la 4]. We collected a ton of data and then built this model. It predicts brain responses to stories.“, he completed.
