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Chat GPT-like technology could be used to understand the thoughts of people with serious neurological conditions. The issue is now that we've discovered it works better than we expected a few years ago, what do we do to mitigate the long-term risks of things more intelligent than us taking control? Geoffrey Hinton, the British Canadian scientist dubbed the godfather of AI, resigned from Google this week warning of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

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