A Brain Scanner Combined with an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse into Your Thoughts

From The Scientific American:

The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn’t construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one’s internal mental processes. “What we’re getting is still kind of a ‘gist,’ or more like a paraphrase, of what the original story was,” says Alexander Huth, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s senior author.

Here’s an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: “i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness.” Inspecting the person’s brain scans, the model went on to decode, “i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn’t see anything and looked up again i saw nothing.”