The Limits of Mind-Reading AI

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Jeff Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, is leaving Google. He and his colleagues have been warning about the dangers of this sort of technology. "We wanted to really lay out what are the limits on this thing," he says. But as models get better, it might be possible to do these things, they say.

For the first time, researchers have found a way to non-invasively translate a person’s thoughts into text. Using fMRI scans and an AI-based decoder trained on a precursor to ChatGPT, the system can reconstruct brain activity to interpret the gist of a story someone is listening to, watching or even just imagining telling. Ian Sample speaks to one of the team behind the breakthrough, the neuroscientist Dr Alex Huth, to find out how it works, where they hope to use it, and whether our mental privacy could soon be at risk. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod