AI is getting better and better with each passing day. And now, a new mind-reading tool powered by artificial intelligence has psychic powers of sorts. It can read the minds of people and produce a video of their thoughts in real-time.
According to a report in the New Scientist, the AI-powered tool was trained by Russian researchers to guess what people are thinking inside their minds and produce videos of the thoughts purely based on their brainwaves.
Researchers recorded the variations in brainwaves while watching videos
Researcher Grigory Rashkov and his colleagues at Russian research firm Neurobiotics trained the AI program using video clips of different objects and recorded the brainwave activity of the participants who were watching these videos.
They recorded the variations in the brainwaves when the brain reacted to the different visual elements in the videos. For recording the brainwave activity the team used an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap and the video clips that the participants were shown included scenes from nature, people on jet skis, and various human expressions.
Human faces hard to recreate
The AI then tried to categorise and recreate the videos from the EEG data. Out of 234 attempts, the AI was successful in categorising 210 videos by providing tags such as waterfalls, extreme sports, and human faces.
The report also noted that the AI seemed to have more success at recreating elements such as colours and large shapes but human faces were harder to recreate because of the high level of details and finer nuances that are found on human faces. Most of human faces recreated by the AI were distorted beyond recognition.
A video of this experiment first surfaced last month. And although mind-reading AIs are getting better at reading the human mind, they are only looking at the surface of human thought, according to Victor Sharmas at the University of Arizona.
He commented on the video saying: "What we are currently seeing is a caricature of human experience, but nothing remotely resembling an accurate recreation."
Accurate AI mind-reading can be achieved in 10 years
Meanwhile, another report from the Daily Star Online observed that accurate AI mind-reading can be a reality in as little as 10 years. Until then, we are sure there will be many debates regarding the goods and the bads of mind-reading AI tools. Just imagine the possibilities and how it would benefit the human race, especially in criminal justice.
As Dr Ian Pearson, a futurologist and ex-cybernetics engineer put it out to the Daily Star: "I don't think it will be very long after that before police are using it in interrogations, getting somebody in for questioning. Instead of a police officer asking questions, they'll stick a helmet on to decide what it is that's going through your mind."
