Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of interpreting and reconstructing human thought.
Scientists recently published a paper in Nature Neuroscience exploring the use of AI to non-invasively translate human thoughts into words in real time.
According to the researchers, current methods of decoding thoughts into words are either invasive—meaning they require surgical implantation or limited because they "recognize only a small set of words or phrases." Stimulate." Austin's team circumvented these li mitations by training a neural network to simultaneously decode functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals from multiple regions of the human brain. For the experiment, the researchers had several test subjects listen to a podcast for hours while their brain activity was recorded non-invasively using an fMRI RI machine. The resulting data is then used to train the system to understand the mindset of a particular user.
After the training, the test subjects had their brain activity monitored again while listening to podcasts, watching short films and silently imagining storytelling. In this part of the experiment, the AI system was fed fMRI data from subjects and decoded the signals into plain language in real time. According to a press release from the University of Texas at Austin, AI can get things done about 50 percent of the time. However, the results were inaccurate — the researchers designed the AI to convey the general idea being thought, not the exact words being thought.
Fortunately, for those who worry about their minds being infiltrated by AI against their will, scientists are well aware that this is currently not possible.
The system only works when it's trained on a specific user's brain waves. This makes it useless for scans for individuals who have not spent hours providing fMRI data. Even if such data was generated without the user's permission, the team ultimately concluded that both the de coding of the data and the machine's ability to monitor thoughts in real time required the active participation of the person being scanned. However, the researchers do note that this may not always be the case: “your privacy analysis suggests that subject cooperation is currently required to train and use the decoder. However, future developments may enable the decoder to circumvent these requirements. Furthermore, even the decoder's predictions in the absence of subject cooperation Circumstances are inaccurate,and they may also be deliberately misinterpreted for malicious purposes." In related news, a group of researchers in Saudi Arabia recently developed a method to improve the accuracy of diagnosing brain tumors by processing MRI scans with a blockchain-based neural network.
In their paper, Saudi researchers show how processing cancer research on a secure, decentralized blockchain can improve accuracy and reduce human error. While both of the above experiments are cited as earlier work in their respective research papers, it is worth noting that the techni ques used in each experiment are widely available.
The AI emphasizing the experiments conducted by the UT Austin team is a generative pretrained transformer (GPT), the same technique employed by ChatGPT, Bard, and similar large language models. The Saudi Arabian team's cancer research was conducted using AI trained on Nvidia GTX 1080s , GPUs that have been available since 2016. In fact, there's nothing stopping a clever developer (with access to an fMRI machine) combining these two ideas to create an AI system that can read a person's thoughts and record them to a blockchain. This could lead to a "proof-of-ideas" paradigm where people might mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for their thoughts, or record them for posterity, legal purposes, or simply bragging rights An immutable ledger of your feelings and thoughts.
For example, the impact of thought-to-blockchain NFT minting could have implications for copywriting and patent filings, where blockchain can serve as definitive proof of when an idea or idea was recorded. It could also allow celebrity thinkers, such as Nobel laureates or Contemporary philosophers, to codify their thoughts into an immutable record a digital asset that can be commoditized and used as a collectible.
