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Scientists Use GPT AI to Passively Read People's Thoughts in Breakthrough
- phkahler 3y agoBlack Mirror here we come
- stuartjohnson12 3y agooh no
- dmm 3y agoPerhaps we can finally know what the dead salmon is thinking? https://archive.is/1WTnq https://archive.is/1WTnq
- airstrike 3y ago:-O :-) :-(
- techwiz137 3y agoThis is coming one way or another and is pretty frightening. Mass surveillance is one thing, but also personal interrogation. You can extract the deepest darkest secrets of any one individual. The thin line of privacy will disintegrate into nothing.
- bandyaboot 3y agoYour point is well-taken. But also worth considering is that people with, say, ALS might have quite a different perspective on this.
- brightstep 3y agoThat’s not true. We don’t need to do this. Absent intervention, sure these technologies are likely to be introduced and invade our lives. But we are humans, not computers, and despite the decisions of the last several decades, we are not required to allow market forces and the profit motive algorithm to make all decisions in our society. We can make whatever rules and decisions we want. It won’t come without a fight, but this horrifying development seems a pretty good place to start.
- freedomben 3y agoWhat government is going to turn down these capabilities? Even if they banned "private sector" development, you can bet they're still gonna go down this road. And frankly, that might be for the best. Imagine whatever country is most antagonistic toward your own, and now imagine their military fully develops this and yours doesn't. How safe/secure are you feeling?
- JohnFen 3y ago> How safe/secure are you feeling? I don't think I'd feel (or be) much less safe/secure if an antagonistic nation developed such a thing and mine didn't. I would certainly feel less safe and secure if my nation had this capability regardless of whether or not others did.
- 13years 3y agoAll roads of AI are converging on the end of privacy. A free society does not exist in the absence of privacy. When you lose privacy you lose ownership over your own thoughts. You lose agency over the direction of your own life. Humanity suffers by either scenario, either by our own agency in control of power we are not prepared to manage or we will be managed by power that we can not control. Many have their focus looking forward to the unknown concerns of AGI; however, these other issues are already nearly imminent and are far less present in discourse around AI. The impacts on socialization and society in general from AI performing exactly as we have requested it may be one of the greatest threats. I've written quite a bit on that aspect, FYI - https://dakara.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-ai-ends-in https://dakara.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-ai-end...
- stickfigure 3y agoYou have to physically climb into an multimillion dollar, 10 ton, liquid-helium-cooled machine and spend hours training it on your brain. We're a long way from the end of private thought, nor is there a roadmap to it. If someone is working on a handheld device that can perform MRI-level scans from across the room, I would be worried about the privacy implications of that technology, not AI.
- cma 3y agoLiquid helium wouldn't be a barrier to being used on key individuals (say leaders of opposition parties in some large authoritarian-ish country). The training would be if it requires cooperation.
- 13years 3y agoThat is missing the point. It is the trajectory. Machines that can analyze all orthogonal data to understand your behavior is not limited to a single dimension of a MRI machine. Facial expression analysis, all of your online conversations, the existence of your entire life is being monitored and recorded. There will be enough data to perceive beyond the veil into the thoughts of the mind.
- kaesar14 3y agoStunning how scientists who work on this stuff delude themselves into thinking it'll do more good than harm.
- ravenstine 3y agoMany of us here on HN do the exact same thing.
- AlexandrB 3y agoWhen the work you're doing is several layers of abstraction removed from its worst applications it's easy to rationalize. For the authoritarian leader, this is a huge advantage of specialization and "replaceable cog in the machine" style of job standardization - no one person is building enough of the "evil" thing to feel responsible for the result, and most of the workers are replaceable enough that the "if I don't do it, they'll just get someone else who will" rationalization is probably correct.
- JohnFen 3y ago> that the "if I don't do it, they'll just get someone else who will" rationalization is probably correct. That may be correct, but from an ethical point of view, it's completely bankrupt. People who justify doing things they know to be unethical on the basis that someone else will just do it anyway are, of course, being unethical even if they are correct. Even worse are those people who think others will do it anyway, so it's better if they themselves (obviously being good people) do it instead of those other, terrible people.
- f6v 3y agoSo the solution is to not work on anything that can be weaponized?
- throwaway71271 3y agoanything can be weaponized, john wick kills people with a pencil :)
- mberlove 3y agoFrom the study: "...we tested whether successful decoding requires subject cooperation and found that subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder." Reading the discussion in the paper, it looks like if you lie "out loud" in your head about what you're thinking, you'll fool the interpretation. For now. Of course that can change -- will almost certainly change as the technology improves. But it's an important caveat at the moment and the researchers clearly paid attention to this aspect.
- coding123 3y agoIt does not require realizing you are cooperating, if you're just playing a VR game in some future version of Quest that captures brain waves while you're navigating a labyrinth.
- JohnFen 3y agoBut it can't read what you aren't sounding out in your mind. It can't determine truthfulness, and it can't find memories. If you're playing a VR game, you probably aren't using your inner voice to articulate your secrets. Although if you are of great importance and interest to people with sufficient resources, they might be able to trick you into doing so in a game world.
- famouswaffles 3y agoThere's also a ways to go with the accuracy. On the other hand though, they trained with an extremely small GPT model (GPT one i believe) so...bitter lesson incoming ?
- jebarker 3y agoThe need for cooperation suggests that what's being learned here is the correlation between brain activity and produced language. Language is not all (maybe most?) of thinking though [1]. So it may not be a certainty that technology improvements allow decoding of subconscious thought processes. This feels related to the possible fundamental limitations of LLMs trained on language too. [1] https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
- JKCalhoun 3y agoAnyone else's AI Bingo card have mind reading? Mine sure as hell doesn't. I think I'm done playing.
- realce 3y agoThe WEF featured this at Davos this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QvtT_lgl_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QvtT_lgl_Q Funny - with all this mind reading, youtube won't autocomplete the query "WEF mind reading" for me.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoHonestly terrifying. The potential for abuse is just to great (maybe not at the moment, but how long until the tech is perfected?). Imagine, for example, being gay in a state that has harsh penalties for being so. Or Theocracies that are not friendly to minority religions. And that's just the more obvious examples.
- f6v 3y agoTruth be told, it’s possible to get information out of people without any of this. Simply by torture, like in Abu Ghraib.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoTorture is notoriously unreliable for retrieving accurate information. Abu Ghraib was just a reflection of America’s unthinking sadism on the global stage, not comparable to a mind reading machine.
- edgyquant 3y agoWay less efficient though
- JohnFen 3y agoAnd incredibly inaccurate.
- jstarfish 3y agoMind reading and thought crime are equal-opportunity problems. Godwin's Law really needs to be updated to account for the gay persecution complex. Any state that corrupt would have a cheaper and easier time just tickling you until you confess.
- hospitalJail 3y agoYou also need to be in an MRI.... Not exactly sure what the 'its just a fad' crowd thinks about this + the Hollywood strikes.
- landryraccoon 3y agoThis technology has tremendous potential for good. It’s not all nefarious. People who are paralyzed or suffering from neurodegenerative diseases might have a chance of regaining independence. New treatments for mental health diseases could be a benefit as well.
- passion__desire 3y agoIt would be nice to have throat muscle movement to text transcription for general people.
- brainbag 3y agoI've usually seen this referred to as subvocalization, and if anyone is working on this or has in the past, I'd love to chat.
- ranprieur 3y agoWow, I thought this was a hundred years away. So far it only works with words. I'm wondering how soon it could work with pictures, so you could imagine a willow tree and the machine shows a willow tree on a screen. A powerful daydreamer could make movies without a camera.
- mxmlnkn 3y agoFrom my perspective the reconstruction of lingual thoughts is the new one. There already were reconstruction of thought images several years ago and recently using diffusion models: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2
- usaar333 3y agoThere's been research into this for over the past decade. Here's a 2017 report: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/june/brain-decoding-complex-thoughts.html https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/june/bra... Of course if you want to get a lot of press, use the term "GPT"
- outlace 3y agoIt is important to keep in mind that the subjects had to get their brains scanned for 16 hours to train the machine learning algorithm to subsequently "decode their thoughts." So this cannot just be wielded on any unsuspecting person. Moreover, I'm skeptical this can be significantly improved as fMRI is quite a blunt instrument when it comes to assessing brain activity; it is a delayed and course-grained view of relatively large volumes of aggregated brain tissue.
- lisper 3y ago> this cannot just be wielded on any unsuspecting person ...yet.
- Alifatisk 3y agoThe Transformer model is really this powerful?
- cloudking 3y agoThink about it as a transformer of bits rather than text. Any data can be transformed really.
- mdp2021 3y agoFor "«powerful»" we could assume that the reference is to identifying the relevant patterns output by the fMRI, while the ANN transformers seem to be more related to the translation into «reconstruct[ed] continuous language from [the] cortical semantic representations»¹. I.e. they seem to be useful to give the interpretation a "form", a way to express it. What you read must be matched with something - transformers are "good at language". ¹https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9.epdf
- DesiLurker 3y ago"There is more to it than meets the eye." -- transformer
- jvanderbot 3y agoAlarm bells aside, this was fascinating: > The decoder produced more accurate results during the tests with audio recordings, compared to the imagined speech, but it was still able to glean some basic details of unspoken thoughts from the brain activity. For instance, when a subject envisioned the sentence “went on a dirt road through a field of wheat and over a stream and by some log buildings,” the decoder produced text that said “he had to walk across a bridge to the other side and a very large building in the distance.” It sounds like it's reading a persons snapshot of the story in a visually-descriptive language. That's really neat! I can imagine this is the beginning of telepathy.
- squarefoot 3y agoIn a world of consumers who would salute as the next cool thing to have a device like a button that interfaces with brainwaves and connects online with devices and social media from the user's forehead, all running on closed non auditable platforms, what could possibly go wrong?
- seu 3y agoWhy is it that in every other development, these days, one reads a quote like "researchers think this would be used for <insert thing that benefits humanity, but will remain underdeveloped because nobody wants to invest enough money in it> but they warn that it could also be used for <insert very negative possible use, in which many with the resources and power will gladly invest if given the possibility and lack of regulation or control of any type>" and yet, they continue developing it because it might "benefit humanity"? Where the hell are you going like this?!
- ftxbro 3y agoThey continue developing it for a career where they afford healthcare and education and stave off misery for a generation or two for themselves and their family.
- bheadmaster 3y agoExactly, global poverty and inflation makes it easier for money-havers to control what population at large puts effort towards. We're all slaves, just on a much bigger scale.
- adverbly 3y agoInteresting. Hard not to think about potential applications when it comes to legal proceedings and court evidence.
- porkbeer 3y agoPolygraphs are already inadmissable, thos tech will be the same.
- JohnFen 3y agoTrue, but yet they're still used with certain job applications, with criminal investigations (the results just aren't used directly as evidence), etc. Most people believe that polygraphs have some amount of validity, and that's a problem that means they continue to get used and continue to do harm.
- jwestbury 3y ago> Most people believe that polygraphs have some amount of validity They have a much higher rate of false positive than false negative. That makes them useful in circumstances where your primary concern is, say, eliminating risky hires for jobs accessing sensitive data -- you may lose lots of good candidates, but your concern isn't fairness.
- DesiLurker 3y agoOkay but how about using this in conjunction with polygraph for some high stakes case where you'd benefit even if you can have slight confirmation of truth. then interrogator (for lack of better word) can structure questions such that you lean the conversation towards truth. In fact now that I think about it, even 'pleading the 5th' can be worked around using this type of setup.
- Nihilartikel 3y agoThis is probably the missing link for useful implanted brain-machine-interfaces too. Previous decoding of neural signals was barely able to meet us half way, that is the subject also adapted to get the desired results and maybe the receiver learned a bit too. The receiver just got a major upgrade..
- soulofmischief 3y agoIt's useful for prosthetics but I'm concerned about a new era of harmful legal pseudoscience in vein of the lie detector.
- kaba0 3y agoTangentially related, I was always intrigued whether it is possible to “record” someone’s inner monologue, when they actively move their vocal cords/folds, but not produce any sound. I think that you might get enough data to reconstruct sentences given that know which language to find words in.
- porkbeer 3y agoThe used this concept using throat mics a few years ago, but cant find the link.
- minchov 3y agoDylan’s closing to his 1965 song, It’s alright Ma…, suddenly feels a bit too real: “And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only” That song, btw, was somewhat prescient of today’s Intrusive Advertising Industrial Complex: “Advertising signs they con You into thinking you’re the one That can do what’s never been done That can win what’s never been won Meantime life outside goes on All around you”
- soupjacket 3y agoPrivacy concerns aside - I'm unclear on the specific approach used in this study and how it differs from previous work and would love some input as to whether my interpretation is correct. From my reading, the tl;dr is that they: - Build a subject-specific model to predict fMRI activations when presenting a subject with words (I don't believe this is novel in and of itself. I know it has been done with ECoG - [1] off the top of my head but I am fairly certain there are others. so maybe using fMRI is the main advance here?) - Use GPT to generate candidate sentences, and see which candidates most match the true activations. (This method of narrowing the solution space seems new.) The improvement on within-subject accuracy over between subject leads me to believe that this is an actual benefit, but I'm struggling to determine how they quantify the improvements over and above "GPT is good at predicting human language". I may be misunderstanding the approach altogether however, so take this with a grain of salt. [1]: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/07/420946/neuroprosthesis-restores-words-man-paralysis https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/07/420946/neuroprosthesis-res...
- jstarfish 3y agoYou don't need MRI machines and experimental technology to read people's thoughts. You just need access to their search (or chat) history. It's not protected by HIPAA, ethical standards or attorney/client privilege. And it's always just ambiguous enough for you to paint whatever picture you need to in order to hang them. Out of concern for data leakage to third-parties, my employer gave employees access to an internal-only Azure instance of GPT3.5. The next thing they did was enable logging of all queries. Security collects the data, but forwards it to the analytics group for reasons even I don't know. Tread lightly with WorkplaceGPT if you don't want your employer to "read your mind" and make future RIF decisions based on your AI-obfuscated incompetence.