Technology has been advancing in leaps and bounds, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now able to read thoughts. This is a concept that even just a few years ago was something unimaginable, but the potential applications of this exciting new technology are wide-ranging and could revolutionize many aspects of human life.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. An incredible experiment proves it. Thought-reading artificial intelligence already exists. And it can display a visualization of these thoughts.
The team of researchers collected brain activity data from the participants. Meanwhile, they were shown images. Then, the data were transmitted to an artificial intelligence model. This reconstructed the images from the brain scans of the participants. This was done while they were inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (iRMf).
Multiple uses
To implement this experiment, careful preparation was carried out. The brain activity of each person was measured for 20 hours. The AI model is known as Mind-Is. It was trained on a large pre-existing database of over 160,000 brain images.
The images generated by the AI do not copy those shown to the experimental subjects. But they do match the objects in the original photos in aspects such as color and texture. The overall subject was correctly reproduced in 84% of the cases, reports NBC.
One of the researchers in the study is Zijiao Chen. He wrote that the technology could be used in medicine, psychology and neuroscience. People who cannot communicate verbally could communicate with their thoughts. They could even operate computers with the power of the mind.
This is not the first experiment to try to use artificial intelligence to visualize the thoughts of humans. Thus, in early March, Vice reported on an experiment by researchers at Osaka University in Japan. He conducted an experiment with similar objectives. The results of their experiment were published in December. In their article, the researchers explained that the study did not involve training an AI model to create the images.
Other experiments
In 2019, Futurism reported on an experiment by a team in Russia. An AI draws what a person is seeing at the time, wearing an electrode beanie.
Thought-reading artificial intelligence has a long way to go. However, its reach will be historic.
