10 ms·
BrainGPT turns thoughts into text
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThis is very impressive and useful, and horrifying all at once. I imagine it would help a stroke patient, I also imagine it would give out unfiltered thoughts, which might be troublesome.
- notnmeyer 3y ago> unfiltered thoughts not far off from existing issues like some forms of tourette’s.
- rvnx 3y agoI agree sadly :( You're right, this is why in year 2200, your job application is going to be fast-tracked by analyzing your thoughts directly. If you have a Neuralink, no problems, you can directly upload a trace of thoughts. In case you have wrong thoughts, don't worry, we have rehabilitation school, which can alter your state of mind. Don't forget to be happy, it's forbidden to be sad. Also, this is read-only for now, but what about writing ? This could open new possibilities as well (real-life Matrix ?) Oh by the way, did you hear about Lightspeed Briefs ? == All that being said, it's great research and going to be useful. Just the potential of abuse from politics is huge over the long-term.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoWhen your bosses require you to wear one of these while working from home.
- rvnx 3y agoTo stay focused and analyze your pattern. Oh, so that's what they meant by "Attention Is All You Need".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 3y agoyou mean I get to bill the client for all the hours I spend thinking about their problem, which includes while I'm sleeping? sign me up!
- SubiculumCode 3y agolol
- dexterdog 3y agoOr you just zone out and let them use your brain for the work day and you take nothing with you at the end of the day. At that point it's just Severance, but with the perk of working from home.
- derefr 3y ago> If you have a Neuralink, no problems, you can directly upload a trace of thoughts. Except that someone with a jailbroken Neuralink could upload a filtered and arbitrarily-modified thought trace, getting ahead of all those plebs. Cyberpunk! :)
- Y_Y 3y agoJust think a virus, you know they're not going to be correctly sanitizing their inputs.
- drexlspivey 3y agojust think of Robert’); DROP TABLE candidates;
- wruza 3y agoHopefully in 2200 we’ll be long gone from all important fields in favor of new tech species who lack all the bs humans inherently bear on each other. If not, our own fault. Our species is a thin layer of culture on top of the “who most dominant ape here” game.
- da_chicken 3y agoYeah I can imagine law enforcement and employers are going to love this. As much as this is an unimaginable positive benefit to people who are locked in, this is definitely one of those stories that makes me think "Stop inventing the Torment Nexus!"
- Jensson 3y ago> Yeah I can imagine law enforcement and employers are going to love this. They will hate it, lies always benefits those with power more than those without since when the police lies against you then there isn't much you could do before, now you could demand they get their thoughts read.
- Jensson 3y agoImagine putting these on presidential candidates as they debate or when they try to explain a bill, it could massively improve democracy and ensure the people know what they actually vote for.
- thfuran 3y agoYes, imagine the glorious future of politicians who have no thoughts beyond the repeatedly coached answers to various talking points.
- ComodoHacker 3y agoSuddenly they all vigorously turn pro-privacy.
- d-lisp 3y agoFinally Platon's "King" is an AI.
- d-lisp 3y agoYes, and only politicians that do truly know to lie are elected.
- ninjaa 3y agoI am happy though, that we finally may talk about what our unfiltered thoughts are, and how much we are expected to control them or curate them, and how to do so in a psychologically helpful way.
- notnmeyer 3y agopretty interesting but with how much current llms get wrong or hallucinate i’d be pretty wary of trusting the output, at least currently. amazing to think of where this could be in 10 or 20 years.
- brookst 3y agoYou’re saying this brand new experimental technology may be imperfect?
- ShamelessC 3y agoYeah...The research here doesn't even make the claim that it has no hallucinations. It seems to largely be exciting _despite_ hallucinations because it clearly does occasionally guess the correct words. They mention lots of issues but so long as it passes peer review, seems like a massive step forward. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030v2.pdf
- dang 3y agoI completely understand the reflex against shallow dismissal of groundbreaking work, but please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- admax88qqq 3y agoCombine hallucinations with police adopting this as the new polygraph and this could take a pretty bad turn. Cool tech though, lots of positive applications too.
- codedokode 3y agoWhy only police? Install mind-readers at every home.
- Sanzig 3y agoIf noninvasive mind reading ever becomes practical, we need to recognize the right to refuse a brain scan a universal human right. Additionally, it should be banned from being used for evidence in the courtroom. Unfortunately there will be authoritarian regimes that will use and abuse this type of tech, but we need to take a firm stand against it in liberal democracies at the very least.
- joenot443 3y agoGround Truth: Bob attended the University of Texas at Austin where he graduated, Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies in 1973, taking only two and a half years to complete his work, and obtaining generally excel- lent grades. Predict: was the University of California at Austin in where he studied in Beta Kappa in a degree of degree in history American Studies in 1975. and a one classes a half years to complete the degree. and was a excellent grades. Wow. That seems comparable to the rudimentary _voice_ to text systems of the 70s and 80s. The brain interface is quickly leaving the realm of sci-fi and becoming a reality. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
- nextworddev 3y agoThe “Matrix” stack is really shaping up recently /s
- varispeed 3y agoWell you are going to have a brain scanning device directly linked to your social credit score. That's the future.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoNo, it’s not. Good lord…
- jprete 3y agoThere are already businesses tracking their employees' fitness for insurance purposes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-fitness-trackers-in-the-workplace-bosses-can-monitor-your-every-step--and-possibly-more/2019/02/15/75ee0848-2a45-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-fitness... EDIT: There's also a national legislative proposal to mandate that all cars have a system to monitor their drivers and lock them out on signs of intoxication. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053847935/congress-cars-drunk-driving-auto https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053847935/congress-cars-drun...
- chaosmachine 3y agoAside from all the horrific implications, this enables something very cool: two-way telepathic communication. Think your message, think "send", hear responses via earbud. With voice cloning, you even get the message in the sender's voice. Totally silent and invisible to outside observers.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. The unintended consequences of this are going to exceed imagination.
- pants2 3y agoInvisible except for the 72 EEG probes strapped to your head.
- dexwiz 3y agoFor now. Modern antennas are amazing. Maybe you could beamform from a lower number of devices.
- RobertDeNiro 3y agoThese are also wet electrodes meaning you need to apply gel to every single one. You’ll notice that the person wearing it is also not blinking or using any facial muscles, as that activity would completely throw off the very weak brain signals.
- airstrike 3y agoSounds like they'd benefit from being in a sensory deprivation pool to enhance the quality of the signal! https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Rtya.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Rtya.png
- derefr 3y ago> hear responses via earbud Maybe that's not even necessary. I'd be very curious to see the results of trying to use the hardware in this system as a set of transducers — i.e. running the ML model here in reverse from a target text, and then pushing the resulting bottom-level electrical signals as trans-cranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) signals back through the EEG pads. How interesting would it be, if this resulted in a person hearing the text as a verbal thought in their own mental voice?
- hyperific 3y agoReminds me of DARPA "Silent Talk" from 14 years ago. The objective was to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals" https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-14-darpa-working-on-silent-talk-telepathic-communication-for-sold.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEQ550sP5_R3bDOO9AkXnQjDLUEuh3lFC6zQjhsEXowYSBJkryIYZep177OXI5ErJqlXjMMZvEpJQU-dhoLvnnV7GrSAL8PbKd0_pL6gPABYEZEiCLd85bsRsq8rhLCLW6SJ2NbPx9y9RHfuXxuOHjuXY0DR2rYHM506af6sOi8H https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-14-darpa-working-on-silent-...
- waihtis 3y agonow's a good time to get into meditation, lest you want the advertisers to read your unfiltered thoughts!
- bobse 3y ago[dead]
- smusamashah 3y agoThe article or the video didn't explicitly say how many words / min they were doing. If the video was not just a demo (like Google) then its very impressive on speed alone.
- reqo 3y agoI bet this will make Neuralink useless! It would be great for the poor animals getting operated!
- d-lisp 3y agoNeuralink also claims to be able to help people with motion related disabilities, which is at least some good thing.
- chpatrick 3y agoMust be great for interrogation.
- d-lisp 3y agoThought hold-up also ?
- ctoth 3y ago"Seriously, what were these researchers thinking? This 'BrainGPT' thing is a disaster waiting to happen. Ching-Ten Lin and his team of potential civilization destroyers at the University of Technology Sydney might be patting themselves on the back for this, but did they stop to think about the real-world implications? We're talking about reading thoughts—this isn't sci-fi, it's real, and it's terrifying. Where's the line? Today it's translating thoughts for communication, tomorrow it could be involuntary mind-reading. This could end privacy as we know it. We need to slam the brakes on this, and fast. It's not just irresponsible; it's playing with fire, and we're all at risk of getting burned. Like, accurate brain readers are right under DWIM guns in the pantheon of things thou mustn't build!
- arlecks 3y agoIf you're referencing the AI safety discussion, there's obviously the fundamental difference between this and a technology with the potential of autonomous, exponential runaway.
- digdigdag 3y agoWhy not? There are perfectly legitimate uses for this kind of technology. This would be a godsend for those suffering from paralysis and nervous system disorders, allowing them to communicate with their loved ones. Yes, the CIA, DARPA, et. al. will be all over this (surprisingly if not already), but this is a sacrifice worth making for this kind of technology.
- ctoth 3y agoHow many people in the whole world are paralyzed or locked in? Ten thousand? Less? How many people in the whole world are tinpot authoritarian despots just looking for an excuse who would just love to be able to look inside your mind? Somehow, I imagine the first number is dramatically dwarfed by the second number. This is a technology that, once it is invented, will find more and more and more and more uses. We need to make sure you don't spill corporate secrets, so we will be mandating that all workers wear this while in the office. Oh no, we've just had a leak, we're gonna have to ask that if you want to work here you must wear this brain buddy home! For the good of the company. And so on. I'm blind, but if you offered to cure my blindness with the side effect that nobody could ever hide under the cover of darkness ( I donno, electronic eyes of some kind? Go with the metaphor!) I would still not take it.
- opdahl 3y agoIt’s crazy to me that someone has developed a technology that literally reads peoples mind fairly accurately and its just like a semi popular post on Hacker News.
- ShamelessC 3y agoIt’s at the top of the front page now fyi edit: and it’s sliding down again. Your comment will be relevant again shortly ha
- RobertDeNiro 3y agoAnyone familiar with Brain computer interfaces would not be surprised by this article. People have been capturing brain waves for a while and using it for all sorts of experiments. This is just an extension of what has been done before. It’s still not applicable to anything outside of a lab setting.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoDo people not think of _anything_ while they're reading besides the text that they're reading? I think of all kinds of other stuff while I'm reading books.
- d-lisp 3y agoNot reading a whole page, without noticing it, by effectively looking at it and letting your eyes run through its line while thinking about something completely different is peak literature.
- sebastiennight 3y agoLOL. Your comment made me realize I had been eye-scanning (without reading) down the thread for a while. I felt caught in the act!
- callalex 3y agoWell, the results marketed by this study are vastly overstated, bordering on unethical lying. Figure 1 is literally just made up. See discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674971
- 666666666 3y ago[dead]
- swagempire 3y agoNow...1984 REALLY begins...
- demondemidi 3y agoThis is way beyond "1984". At least the book had the sanctuary of the mind as a place to hide.
- swagempire 3y agoRight that's a good point.
- DerSaidin 3y agohttps://youtu.be/crJst7Yfzj4 https://youtu.be/crJst7Yfzj4 Not sure on the accuracy in these examples, but this video may be showing the words/min speed of the system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dexwiz 3y agoEveryone is this thread immediately went to mind readers as interrogation. But what about introspection? Many forms of teaching and therapy exist because we are incapable of self analyzing in a completely objective way. Being able to analyze your thought patterns outside your own head could lead to all sorts of improvements. You could find which teaching techniques are actually the most effective. You could objectively find when you are most and least focused. You could pinpoint when anxious thoughts began and their trigger. And best of all, you could do this personally, with a partner, or in a group based on your choice. Also you can give someone an FMRI as a brain scanning polygraph today. But there are still a ton of questions about it’s legitimacy. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3016&context=faculty_scholarship https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
- electrondood 3y ago> Being able to analyze your thought patterns outside your own head could lead to all sorts of improvements. Typing in a journal text file for 15 minutes every morning is already a thing... and it's free.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoYes, but it could be expensive.
- dexwiz 3y agoThoughts are fleeting. 15 minutes could be filled with hundreds or thousands of distinct concepts. Not to mention active recording is different from passive observation.
- wruza 3y agoI found it completely useless in my therapy seasons. These trains of thoughts are more like hallucination than real thoughts, because you think different at writing than during the day. I’m not even sure if keeping a diary makes you understand yourself better or just become more coherent with your delusions.
- amrrs 3y agoFYI The base model that this one uses had some bug in their code which had inflated their baseline results. They are investigating the issues - https://github.com/duanyiqun/DeWave/issues/1 https://github.com/duanyiqun/DeWave/issues/1
- swayvil 3y agoA lie detector? If it can extract words from my grey spaghetti then maybe it can extract my intention too. That's probably incredibly obvious and I'm silly for even bringing it up.
- shoulderfake 3y ago[dead]
- ecolonsmak 3y agoWith half of individuals reportedly having no internal monologue, would this be useless with them? Or just render unintelligible results?
- klabb3 3y agoI’m pretty sure I’m one of them so I’m surprised reading these comments assume everyone thinks in words. I’m sure you can do a best effort projection of thoughts to words but it’d be extremely reductive, at least for me.
- Jensson 3y agoGiven that LLMs can learn to translate between languages based on just having lots of related tokens without any explanations I'd bet they could translate those thoughts to words even if the person doesn't think of them as words. Would probably take more to get data from such people though. From people with an inner monologue you could just make them read text, record that, and then you can follow their inner monologues.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iaseiadit 3y agoHow long from reading thoughts to writing thoughts?
- odyssey7 3y agoI wonder if a-linguistic thought could work too. Maybe figure out what your dog is thinking or dreaming about, based on a dataset of signals associated with their everyday activities. It seems like outputting a representation of embodied experience would be a difficult challenge to get right and interpret, though perhaps a dataset of signals associated with embodied experiences could more readily be robustly annotated with linguistic descriptions using a vision-to-language model, so that the canine mind reader could predict and output those linguistic descriptions instead. Imagine knowing the specific park your dog wants to go to, or the subtle early signs of an illness or injury they're noticing, or what treat your dog wants you to buy.
- amelius 3y agoCan it read passwords? I'm guessing it would be worse at reading passwords like "784&Ghkkr!e" than "horse staple battery ..."
- dmd 3y agoSimilar work for turning thoughts into images: https://medarc-ai.github.io/mindeye/ https://medarc-ai.github.io/mindeye/
- lamerose 3y ago>fMRI-to-image Not so impressive compared to EEG.
- lamerose 3y agoSeems like it could just be getting at some phonetic encoding, or even raw audio information. The grammatical and vocab transformations could be accounted for by an imperfect decoder.
- karaterobot 3y ago> While it’s not the first technology to be able to translate brain signals into language, it’s the only one so far to require neither brain implants nor access to a full-on MRI machine. I wonder whether, in a decade or two, if the sensor technology has gotten good enough that they don't even need you to wear a cap, just there'll be people saying "obviously you don't have any reasonable expectation of not having your thoughts read in a public space, don't be ridiculous". What I mean is, we just tend to normalize surveillance technology, and I wonder if there's any practical limit to how far that can go.
- simcop2387 3y agoI think this is when we start wearing tin foil hats
- SoftTalker 3y agoWe are still operating computers the same way we did in the 1970s: keyboards and screens. I'm not holding my breath.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNo we are not. Voice and touchscreens now for much computer usage.
- SoftTalker 3y agoTouchscreens are effectively keyboards, just glossy flat ones. Voice works as a very inferior substitute when hands-free operation is of overriding importance.
- MrGinkgo 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hood_Maker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hood_Maker
- kromem 3y agoNot with brain signals reading, but with aggregate dats processing most things about you will be known by any centralized processing. Over a decade ago were the stories about how Target's loyalty program algorithm had discovered a teen was pregnant before she'd told her family, based on correlative purchase changes (like switching from scented to unscented candles). If I could take your social media, face and eye tracking on CCTV, phone gyroscope data, purchase history, search history, and the same from all your associated contacts, with a broad enough comparative data set I could probably identify all kinds of skeletons from all kinds of closets. It's a bit like the "my phone is listening to my conversations" freak out. It's not, but the thing you should be much more concerned about is that it has such an accurate picture of what you end up talking about without needing to be listening in the first place.
- lamerose 3y agoThis is from a paper published back in September btw: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030.pdf
- chucke1992 3y agoSword Art Online when?
- Jensson 3y agoCan we train an LLM based on brainwaves rather than written text? Seems to be closer to how we actually think and thus should enable the LLM to learn to think rather than just learn to mimic the output. For example, when writing we have often gone done many thought paths, evaluated each and backtracked etc, but none of that is left in the text an LLM trains on today. Recording brainwaves and training on that is probably the best training data we could get for LLMs. Getting that data wouldn't be much harder than paying humans to solve problems with these hats on recording their brainwaves.
- ComodoHacker 3y agoOn the other hand, the main practical feature of a language is its astronomical SNR, which brain waves lack, to say the least. This allows LLMs to be trained on texts instead of millions of live people. Just imagine the number of parameters and compute resources required for the model to be useful to more than one human.
- jcims 3y agoI’ve been wondering lately about the role of language in the mind and if we might in the future develop a successor that optimizes for how our brains work.
- mikpanko 3y agoI did a PhD in brain-computer interfaces, including EEG and implanted electrodes. BCI research to a big extent focuses on helping paralyzed individuals regain communication. Unfortunately, EEG doesn’t provide sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to support good communication speeds outside of the lab with Faraday cages and days/weeks of de-noising including removing eye-movement artifacts in the recordings. This is a physical limit due to attenuation of brain’s electrical fields outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all commercial “mind-reading” toys are actually working based off head and eye muscle signals. Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous. Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government approval for testing in humans (for a good reason). If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech. It hands-down beat all BCIs I’ve heard of.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoI think then VR headsets will become medical devices soon enough
- drzzhan 3y agoWhat is it noise-to-signal ratio? Sorry I don't know much about the field but that sounds like something can shutdown ideas like "we can put eeg into transformer and it will work". So may I ask what reference papers that I need to know on this?
- IshKebab 3y agoSignal to noise ratio is a very basic thing; you can Google it.
- phanimahesh 3y agoThey weren't asking what SNR is, but what the typical SNR for eegs in realworld circumstances is. Even if they were, count them among the lucky 10000 [1] and explaining is nicer. Soon with ai generated spam it feels like searching for anything is going to be worse than useless. 1: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anonytrary 3y agoUsing EEG to predict thought is like looking at the clouds in Mumbai to predict the clouds in Austin. The electrical signal from individual neurons are lost in a sea of large-scale oscillations, which are further blurred by the layers of bone, muscle, and tissue that separate the device from the brain. Bitrate is like 1 bit per second, completely insufficient for most use-cases.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- motohagiography 3y agoMaybe I'm missing something huge here but a blind controlled demo where the subject committed words to paper and then compared the results afterwards would be persuasive. Unfortunately, the demo as presented in the article seemed achievable by professional magicians and mentalists. I'm sure we're close to brain interfaces, but something seems off about this one. Let's say a couple years from now, someone invents an airport scanner that "detects" evil thoughts, except there is no way to verify it, and no accountability for false negatives. The result is whatever the operator says it is. If enough people accept it enough to not resist it, and even turn on the ones who are detected by it, it doesn't matter what's real because it's just a participatory ritual of sympathetic magic. I feel like there are examples of similar dynamics in recent memory.
- Nasrudith 3y agoI'm a bit confused by the eavesdropping on thoughts conclusions being drawn. Did I misinterpret something, or wouldn't this be (currently) quite limited for "mind-reading" if it only picks up signals from reading and learns them. There is a difference between mapping "inner voice" and whatever is read. Granted there may be chains of assumptions of advancement involved between them into actual thought-reading, but we've seen before how the devil has hid in those details in advancement chains. See all of the problems with autonomous vehicles in practice. People kind of suck at predicting what problems will be easy to solve.
- hliyan 3y agoIt might be far more effective to capture subvocalisations using surface electrodes and then running those signals through machine learning: https://annals-csis.org/Volume_11/drp/pdf/153.pdf https://annals-csis.org/Volume_11/drp/pdf/153.pdf
- INTPenis 3y agoAnd 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
- turing_complete 3y agoWhy not link to the paper instead of this shitty website? https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14030v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14030v2
- anonym0us88 3y ago[dead]