AI Pushing Boundaries on Journey to Mass 'Mind Reading'

Using AI-powered technology to peer into the mind's eye is no longer fiction, with increasingly more research across the globe venturing onto this path.

Cutting-edge technology has been unveiled by a collaboration of researchers, promising to use AI-powered tools to potentially venture into such unchartered territory as "mind-reading."

National University of Singapore (NUS) scientists, in conjunction with colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, have come up with a groundbreaking creation. Their "MinD-Vis" AI tool relies on the technique of associating brain scans with images. Close to 58 participants volunteered to undergo brain scanning in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine. The process presupposes exposing these individuals to between 1,200 and 5,000 different images. This, in turn, could be used to construct individualized AI models for each participant.

One such volunteer, Li Ruilin, was cited by media reports as saying: "I'm also interested in what happened in my brain and what my brain can output and what I'm thinking. So I try to participate and to see what really happened in my brain."

X screenshot showing AI research participant Li Ruilin who got his brain scanned in an MRI machine

© Photo : Hot news/X

One of the lead researchers involved in the study, Jiaxin Qing of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said:

"So after we collect enough training data for you, we can create an individual AI model for you, and this AI model is kind of a translator. It can understand your brain activities just like ChatGPT understand the natural languages of humans."

The team of scientists explained to the media that the "mind reading" begins once the participant in the trials returns for another brain scan.

"So next time you come in, you will do the scan and in the scan you will see the visual stimuli like this. And then we'll record your brain activities at the same time. And your brain activities will go into our AI translator and this translator will translate your brain activities into a special language that a Stable Diffusion can understand, and then it will generate the images you are seeing at that point. So that's basically how we can read your mind in this sense," Jiaxin Qing said.

For all those wondering whether such amazing technology can “mind-read” the masses, the answer, at least so far, is “no.” There are far too many issues that would need to be resolved in the future, such as potential risk of an individual dataset being “assessed” without consent. Plus, there is the vacuum still surrounding aspects of AI research legislation.

"The privacy concerns is the first important thing and then people might be worried, whether the information we provided here might be assessed or shared without prior consent. So the thing to address this is we should have very strict guidelines, ethical and and law in terms of how to protect the privacy," stated Juan Helen Zhou, associate professor at NUS Medicine.

The researchers have reiterated that the AI system in question is tailored, or “modeled,” to individual participants.

Earlier in the year, the same team of researchers used generative AI to reconstruct "high-quality" video from brain readings, publishing their findings on the arXiv preprint server. They demonstrated a parallel between videos shown to subjects involved in their research, and AI-generated videos created based on their brain activity.