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May 15, 2023: Mark tries to convince Matt Warwick to say no to a brain chip

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Today: Mark tries to convince Matt Warwick to say no to a brain chip

• Garbage Time, Matt Warwick's show on WFMU (Tuesdays 9am-12noon Eastern)

• A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading (NYT, May 1, 2023)

In their study, Dr. Huth and his colleagues effectively reversed the process, using another A.I. to translate the participant’s fMRI images into words and phrases. The researchers tested the decoder by having the participants listen to new recordings, then seeing how closely the translation matched the actual transcript.

Almost every word was out of place in the decoded script, but the meaning of the passage was regularly preserved. Essentially, the decoders were paraphrasing.

Original transcript: “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 only finding darkness.”

Decoded from brain activity: “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.” While under the fMRI scan, the participants were also asked to silently imagine telling a story; afterward, they repeated the story aloud, for reference. Here, too, the decoding model captured the gist of the unspoken version.

Participant’s version: “Look for a message from my wife saying that she had changed her mind and that she was coming back.”

Decoded version: “To see her for some reason I thought she would come to me and say she misses me.”

• AI makes non-invasive mind-reading possible by turning thoughts into text (The Guardian, May 1, 2023): “An AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time. The decoder could reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data.”

• A Mind-Reading AI Translated People’s Brain Scans Into Words and Sentences (The Daily Beast, May 1, 2023): "the subjects told five 1-minute stories while recorded by the fMRI. They then told the stories aloud to provide reference transcripts. The study’s authors were able to identify the story that the subjects were telling after decoding their brain scans. While the decoder wasn’t perfect and could only translate broader thoughts and ideas, it still matched the accuracy of the actual transcripts more closely than if things were left to pure chance."

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