Telepathic AI Can Recreate Photorealistic Memories From A Person’s Thoughts

Forget crystal balls. This artificial intelligence catapults us into the future by being able to conjure up images just by reading the brainwaves of a person.

Created by researchers at Radboud University, an fMRI scanner—which is a non-invasive brain reader—can scan a person’s mind when attached. The study was published in the Nature journal. 

How it reads thoughts is by analyzing the change in blood flow in someone’s brain. The fMRI then scans the brain for neurons responsible for vision.

The fMRI sends this data to a computer AI, which evaluates the information and pieces the picture together.

The “STIM” column in the above picture reveals photos being shown to the subject, and columns one and two are the reconstructions produced by the AI.

In order to train the AI to dream up these images, the apparatus was attached to a person’s head while they were actively looking at a select group of images of different people. The AI studied those thoughts and then was able to recognize them later on when the test subject was asked to imagine the faces of the people shown prior.

The results were almost accurate replicas of the faces. 

Apparently, the key to such precise results is to not provide the person or the AI with images of people that actually exist. Instead, the portraits were generated by computers and are made up of tiny dots, which each translate as a computer code for the system to pick up when the human subject thinks of the face.

Thirza Dado, from the study, mentioned that this was just the first step in training AI to read thoughts. The researchers eventually hope to develop this technology to restore vision in people who have lost their eyes due to disease or through an accident.

[via PetaPixel and DIY Photography, images via Thirza Dado et al., (CC BY 4.0)]