Artificial intelligence: AI could one day read our minds life & knowledge

2023-03-09 12:58:04

Artificial intelligence can retrieve information in seconds, create text and even copy works of art with frightening perfection. Now researchers are working on being able to read minds from the AI.

At least the Japanese scientists Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto from Osaka University have already managed to get the AI ​​to recall images from memory. To do this, the researchers used an AI system to read brain scans, interpret them and reproduce almost identical versions of previously viewed photos, reports the specialist magazine „Science“.

For your Preprint Study (not yet checked by other scientists) they used the deep learning text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, developed in 2022. It has been trained with word descriptions on billions of images and creates complete works of art, among other things, with only text prompts.

The Japanese added additional training to the standard stable diffusion algorithm using an online data set provided by the University of Minnesota (USA). It consisted of magnetic resonance imaging brain scans of four subjects who had to look at 10,000 photos during a study.

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When people look at a photograph, the temporal lobes of the brain primarily register information about the content of the picture (people, objects, or landscapes), while the occipital lobes focus on perspective, such as scale. All this information is recorded in magnetic resonance imaging, and these patterns could then be converted into a mimicked image using AI.

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The researchers then tested their system on additional brain scans of the same participants. To do this, they had to look at photos of, among other things, a teddy bear, an airplane, a train, a skier and a church tower. By comparing the brain patterns seen when viewing these images with those generated in the training dataset, the AI ​​system was able to imitate the new photos with startling confidence. The AI ​​only formed a rather abstract structure out of the church tower.

However, the AI ​​system was only tested on the brain scans of the four people who also provided the training data. Extending it to other people would require retraining the system.

However, systems neuroscientist Shinji Nishimoto, who was involved in the study, hopes that with further refinement and larger data sets, it could be used to read minds and dreams in the future. But it could be years before then.