Aljazeera.com
Originally posted 7 APR 203
Yu Takagi could not believe his eyes. Sitting alone at his desk on a Saturday afternoon in September, he watched in awe as artificial intelligence decoded a subject’s brain activity to create images of what he was seeing on a screen.
“I still remember when I saw the first [AI-generated] images,” Takagi, a 34-year-old neuroscientist and assistant professor at Osaka University, told Al Jazeera.
“I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and saw my face, and thought, ‘Okay, that’s normal. Maybe I’m not going crazy'”.
Takagi and his team used Stable Diffusion (SD), a deep learning AI model developed in Germany in 2022, to analyse the brain scans of test subjects shown up to 10,000 images while inside an MRI machine.
After Takagi and his research partner Shinji Nishimoto built a simple model to “translate” brain activity into a readable format, Stable Diffusion was able to generate high-fidelity images that bore an uncanny resemblance to the originals.
The AI could do this despite not being shown the pictures in advance or trained in any way to manufacture the results.
“We really didn’t expect this kind of result,” Takagi said.
Takagi stressed that the breakthrough does not, at this point, represent mind-reading – the AI can only produce images a person has viewed.
“This is not mind-reading,” Takagi said. “Unfortunately there are many misunderstandings with our research.”
“We can’t decode imaginations or dreams; we think this is too optimistic. But, of course, there is potential in the future.”
Note: If AI systems can decode human thoughts, it could infringe upon people's privacy and autonomy. There are concerns that this technology could be used for invasive surveillance or to manipulate people's thoughts and behavior. Additionally, there are concerns about how this technology could be used in legal proceedings and whether it violates human rights.
