Machines that can read thoughts? Although this sounds like science fiction, it is already a reality.
A group of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin developed a system based on artificial intelligence that is capable of reading and interpreting people’s thoughts.
This AI, called a semantic decoder, seeks to help people who have trouble communicating but have clear-headed thinking, such as stroke patients.
The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin. The work is based in part on a transformer model, similar to those that drive ChatGPT from Open AI and bard from google.
How does the AI that can read thoughts work?
AI can reconstruct the general idea of the story that a person hears or imagines telling silently and transform it into text. The best part is that this technology works through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). That is, it is not required to insert surgical implants.
“For a non-invasive method, this is a real breakthrough compared to what’s been done before, which is usually single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We are getting the model to decode a continuous language over long periods of time with complicated ideas.”
It should be noted that the method cannot be used without the patient’s knowledge. The researchers tested the system on users in a control group who had not been informed of what the AI could do. The semantic decoder returned incomprehensible results.
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