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Technology

Mind-reading AI uses brain scans to guess what you're looking at

By Timothy Revell

1 March 2018

A woman in an art gallery looking at pieces of art on the walls

It’s nice, but my AI doesn’t know what to make of it

plainpicture/Blend Images/JGI/Tom Grill

Can you guess what I’m looking at? Artificial intelligence can. A new system developed in Japan can describe a picture someone is viewing, using brain scans alone.

Algorithms have recently become pretty good at generating image captions, however they normally get to see the images they are captioning. Now it seems the same techniques can be used to generate captions via scans of a person’s brain.

“I consider it a form of mind reading, or perhaps at this point just mind skimming,”…

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