A “mind reading” AI

Digital Trends:

Think that Google’s search algorithms are good at reading your mind? That’s nothing compared to a new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan, which can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.

To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.

This is just a seed of a concept, the barest proof of concept. But it’s not nothing. This deep neural network can track the changes to a brain scan and draw conclusions about what that brain was viewing.

This is a small, terrifying step toward dystopia. Sci-Fi writers, start your engines.