Crazy new AI can read your mind to recreate what you’re looking at

AI could one day be out of control. At least, that seems to be the general idea behind many doomsayers about artificial intelligence. While some are worried about the dangers AI poses to humanity, others will undoubtedly be excited by a new development: Mind-reading AI.

An AI that can read your mind, well, that’s just hogwash, right? Straight science fiction! Well, not exactly. Based on new research conducted by a team of researchers, a new AI might just be able to recreate the things you’re thinking about–and with startling accuracy.

The mind-reading AI doesn’t exactly read your mind in the moment, though. Instead, it looks at recordings of your brain activity and then uses the markers there to recreate images of what it believes you were looking at.

According to the researchers, the results they saw were greatly improved when the AI learned which parts of the brain it needed to pay attention to. To test the AI, the researchers first used a functional MRI (fMRI) to record the brain activity of three people, who were shown a series of photographs.

They then fed these recordings to the mind-reading AI to see how closely it could recreate the images that the people had been shown. In this particular research, the results were mind-blowingly accurate. Of course, the results also showed that it is much easier for the AI to recreate AI-generated images than images that weren’t generated using AI.

That’s likely something to do with the algorithms that AI systems used to create the images in the first place. The researchers have made their findings available on the preprint server bioRxiv.