Japanese Mind-reading AI Technology

Mind-reading AI technology developed by Japanese scientists showed an astounding level of accuracy.

13:31 07 January 2018

Japanese scientists are making science fiction a reality with their mind-reading AI technology, a program that read minds through recreated images one pixel at a time.

 

The team of experts from the University of Kyoto has designed the program based on a neural network system, allowing it to decode brain activity and reproduce images presented to test subjects.

 

During their trial, the team presented photos of stained glass windows, red post boxes, owls and aircrafts to three volunteers. They then used FMRI scans to measure the information and analyse electrical activity and blood flow to the brain.

 

Although the results of the test varied, the majority showed an outstanding level of accuracy recreating objects as well as others imagined by test subjects, such as bowling balls, leopards, swans and goldfish.

 

In the report, the scientists said: "We found that the generated images resembled the stimulus images (both natural images and artificial shapes) and the subjective visual content during imagery,”

 

"While our model was solely trained with natural images, our method successfully generalized the reconstruction to artificial shapes, indicating that our model indeed 'reconstructs' or 'generates' images from brain activity, not simply matches to exemplars."