Can AI Read Your Mind?
The answer is yes
In May 2023, Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at the University of Texas, Austin, made a breakthrough in non-invasive “brain-reading.”
You can read their research paper — Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings — here.
Their artificially intelligent semantic decoder can understand the brain signals of a person listening to a sound recording (such as a podcast) and convert those signals into a continuous stream of text. This can be a giant leap forward for people who cannot speak or have lost the ability to physically communicate due to a stroke or paralysis.
An important advantage of this technology is that it is non-invasive. Participants do not need surgical implants to be part of this experiment.
Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone. The LLM used for text-generation is GPT-1.
