Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system capable of reading people’s thoughts by measuring brain activity and converting it into text—a development that triggers worries about privacy and freedom.
The study (pdf), published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on May 1, used a transformer model, similar to the one that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, to decode people’s thoughts. A transformer model is a neural network that learns context, and thus meaning. Test subjects initially listened to hours of podcasts and the brain activity was recorded. The researchers then trained the decoder on these recordings. Later, the subjects listened to a new story or imagined telling a story, which allowed the decoder to generate corresponding text by analyzing brain activity.
