Better learn about “brain privacy,” because it may soon go the way of the dodo.
Researchers have developed an AI tool that can predict what you’re looking at by analyzing your brain scans — and then generate a strikingly accurate recreation of what you’re picturing. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that it’s a “mind-reading” tool, though it currently doesn’t work as seamlessly as it might in a sci-fi novel.
“The results seem very impressive,” Tommy Sprague, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told MIT Tech Review. “But if there’s a way to surreptitiously extract information about what you’re thinking about, then… 150 years of sci-fi can come true anytime, and that’s worrisome in a lot of ways.”
It’s not the first research to recreate images in someone’s head from brain scans. But Michal Irani at the Weizmann Institute of Science, whose team developed the tool, says their work is able to create a higher fidelity representation of what’s being pictured.
