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AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region
- drivebyhooting 3mo agoReminds me of the parrot https://www.sfsfss.com/stories2/BLIT.htm https://www.sfsfss.com/stories2/BLIT.htm
- ben_w 3mo agoAs others on Telegram have said: automated search for visual superstimuli likely leads to bad outcomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) Also: one of the V3A animations reminds me loosely of things I saw when I was a kid, at night, shortly before I slept (though my experience then was more circular).
- TMWNN 3mo agoOr as SCP calls them, cognitohazards. Also relevant: <https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...> My understanding is that those who work with the mentally handicapped use bright lights and other stimuli to soothe and control them. It is also my understanding that the autistic are stimulated by vibrant colors (coughcoughMy Little Ponycoughcough). Who is to say that the rest of us are not also vulnerable to such controlling stimuli?
- ben_w 3mo agoBright lights in particular, I'm thinking: yes, normal people do find sunbathing relaxing.
- sudo_cowsay 3mo agoIsn't there that one Harry Potter warning. I think it was the potion guy who said too much luck is dangerous. I guess that is somewhat of a parallel to this. Too much positive visual stimuli is dangerous or bad.
- baxtr 3mo agoOn telegram?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Tenemo 3mo agoOthers on Telegram? Some sort of a HN channel?
- bogwog 3mo agoHow fried does someone's brain have to be to say "others on telegram", as if everyone is in the same chatrooms together? If they're on HN, they should at least know why that doesn't make sense, so I have to assume they're in a deteriorated mental state. Friendly reminder to touch grass on a regular basis... Even virtual grass in a video game is a good pressure valve for excessive social media use.
- aswegs8 3mo agoBreaking news: TikTok is bad for you
- idiotsecant 3mo agoThere are undoubtedly 'adversarial images' that will induce certain effects in particular biological minds. It seems like this is neither good or bad inherently, just another tool.
- stymaar 3mo agoSo are opioids. Or how a very useful tool can become a public health catastrophe.
- calibas 3mo ago> one of the V3A animations reminds me loosely of things I saw when I was a kid, at night, shortly before I slept Hypnagogic hallucinations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
- jocelyner 3mo ago[dead]
- karel-3d 3mo agoI can't wait until I see AI-generated gambling ads that are specifically created to stimulate my brain the most
- Traubenfuchs 3mo agoMy brain never liked vertical video, shortform content and AI slop. Is my brain different or am I just a grumpy millenial hipster?
- TMWNN 3mo agoI hope my brain is also different. I also have never spent hours scrolling through short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebok, etc. I never ever walk outside with my phone in my hand, instead enjoying the view. I do enjoy watching YouTube videos at home, on the living-room flatscreen, on a variety of topics, but I select them manually, one at a time, from the vast selection The Algorithm(TM) offers me, plus my own searches.
- sebastiennight 3mo agoMy current theory is that these are similar to cigarettes. Nobody likes the first draft, it burns your lungs, your entire body wants to reject it. But the nicotine stimulates just the right receptors so that if you keep at it for just long enough, you'll be hooked and start disregarding the terrible taste, smell, tar in your lungs, and yellowing of your teeth. All of this to say, if you subjected yourself to just enough TikTok scrolling on just the right topic, you might find yourself using it occasionally after that initial hump, then slightly more frequently, then daily. You might still not "like" it, but the habit is what matters.
- rightbyte 3mo agoI have the opposite theory. I burned my self out on cheap and bad image gen meme sites like 15 years ago until the point I hated memes. Prior exposure to worse feeds gives like an analytical look on the vids rather than emotional. I am fast scanning for the joke. Or something.
- Traubenfuchs 3mo agoAs a teenager, I tried to get addicted to cigarettes so I could stand by the cool kids and smoke with them. I started smoking 4-6 cigarettes a day but hated it so much, I couldn't continue after a week or two...
- fragmede 3mo agoThat's fascinating. I wish the demo videos were longer.
- weikju 3mo agoAm I the only one who is avoiding even clicking the link just in case?
- cyclopeanutopia 3mo agoNo, you are not alone.
- rightbyte 3mo agoIt is like screen saver moving patterns or corridors with a strange field of view zooming effect. Nothing special compared to purpose made screen savers.
- weikju 3mo agoThat’s what someone would say if they were brainwashed by them!!! Half joking, half paranoid.
- akramachamarei 3mo agoReally, I don't think you need to worry. A prevailing latent attitude in the comments is that the brain is somehow super malleable and subject to external control through some incantations. Like subliminal messaging, it will at most be moral panic that fades, and then people will act like they never believed in it.
- rightbyte 3mo agoI'd argue that the guys in the chair 'optimizing' those vids might be the sleeper agemt you need to look out for. It is probably somewhat personal?
- tialaramex 3mo ago
- whearyou 3mo agoStraight out of Echopraxia. Will be interesting to see how strong the controlling forces can be - enough to make you miss things in direct perception like in the book, or only softer effects further up the cognition layer stack
- voidmain 3mo agoWe are really getting to the point where the tech industry must be stopped if humanity is to continue at all, let alone thrive.
- tefkah 3mo agoThis does indeed seem comically evil. While surely this may provide somewhat interesting insights in how our brain processes things, this seems squarely past the "should" part of "you scientists were so obsessed with whether you could you failed to consider whether you should"
- p-e-w 3mo ago> This does indeed seem comically evil. And I have yet to see a single paper like this where a researcher bails out and publicly says they refuse to work on such projects. Not one. The most benign interpretation of this observation is that science is filled with spineless opportunists who don’t care who they hurt with what they create. A slightly less benign interpretation might be that many of these people are doing this deliberately, and getting off on the sense of power it gives them.
- pishpash 3mo agoWould it be better if this was done on monkeys? Because people did that before this in silico digital brain stuff.
- Cakez0r 3mo agoIn their defence, don't shoot the messenger. Just because they published it doesn't mean that others haven't already discovered it. Better to know its possible than be completely ignorant.
- Arodex 3mo agoThen maybe publish the results, but don't publish the "how to".
- 3mo ago
- numpad0 3mo agoWait, this is with a digital twin only? Not fMRI or webcam based?
- FeepingCreature 3mo ago"Prime Intellect, I would like you to begin stimulating the neurons of the pleasure center of my brain, one at a time, and remember the ones I report to you as being favorable."
- calebgcc 3mo agoI wonder what Meta could do with a similar technology… But here we can start also the usual discussion about technology research for the sake of it vs calibration of possible side effects of new research Personally i think we haven’t solve this problem and thus it’s just a matter of time until we’ll get in a non-going-back point
- stainablesteel 3mo agothese videos were disappointing and underwhelming
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoIf you read the techbique it reads like something far less remarkable being PR’d to sound like a big deal. The fact it’s bucketing by making images of lighting and facial expressions, the fact it doesn’t natively do the video it does an image then video generates from it. The results look really bad and samey. Doubt this would work for the actual thing they’re pitching it for.
- nullbio 3mo agoThis is already happening at scale by the social media feed algorithms. We don't need generated content to accomplish this. In a sea of user created content, plenty of it is already at peak activation.
- momocowcow 3mo agoThe plan is to get content producers out of the loop to reduce revenue share and boost profits.
- charcircuit 3mo agoOptimizing for engagement is a categorically different goal than optimizing for lighting up a specific part of someone's brain.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nullbio 3mo agoThere's algorithmic ways to accomplish the same thing without requiring monitoring of the brain, if there's enough data to pull from. Semantic analysis + engagement monitoring is more than enough. Peoples emotions expressed via comments is a reflection of brain region activation. The end result of this will be that creating viral or maximally converting content will not be restricted to the top content creators. It will also result in down regulation of those brain regions due to constant stimulation, so the bar will increase for what classifies as attention grabbing and the brain will filter most of it out as noise. All in all, I don't really see this being a big difference to the outcomes we're already seeing.
- amanharshx 3mo agoWOW! Cant wait to tell to future generations that we had voluntarily made these algorithms to manipulate and influence our own brains
- StefanBatory 3mo agoHow can one work on that and not consider that they're pure evil?
- OhioMan2943 3mo agoThink of the shareholders (it's time to start using physical force to stop people)
- gspr 3mo agoFor one, it's bound to teach us something about our brains. And while I'm not usually an optimist, I actually find it more likely that we'll take active steps to stop the evil applications of this if research like this is out in the open.
- akramachamarei 3mo agoTo flip the question on it's head, what exactly do you see as the "evil" potential? The most prominent comments to this effect are just scifi handwaving.
- aacid 3mo agoWhat are these videos supposed to do? I watched few of them and it does nothing for me? if it is targetting visual regions of brain and I have aphantasia (I cannot visualize anything in my mind) is that connected?
- gspr 3mo ago> I watched few of them and it does nothing for me? It's so cool that you have an MRI handy to check such things.
- throwaw12 3mo agoApart from ethically bad and evil use cases of this application, can we use it to massage the parts of brain like we do it to our bones and muscles with the help of physiotherapists? reason I am asking it could be some relief to our brains after tedious working day, especially after heavy AI usage
- bootsmann 3mo agoIts also an interesting way to discover what that part of the brain is for, right.
- awestroke 3mo agowhat the brain needs is Default Mode Network, not more stimuli
- sebastiennight 3mo agoSure. The relief is actually free ; though once every 10 uses we'll spike your dopamine-related brain centers to 1,100% activation for a quick second while flashing a peptide sponsor ad, then back to normal. You can of course, also not get the spike ads, by subscribing to Premium. Just have a quick look at this animated QR code, it will explain better than I can in writing. Edit: there used to be an OSS app you could use where you actually pick what you want activated in your brain and when, but it's been banned after one of the commercial producers's investors convinced the government that this technology was too powerful, so only government-approved apps are allowed now, and an emergency vote passed the BrainControl law authorizing logging of all visual stimuli you look at, in order to protect your children.
- 55555 3mo agoWhat in the zuck is this?
- Orochikaku 3mo agoI wonder if the end-game of this field of research will be to run these simulations at scale using neuron-on-a-chip services such as [0] Cortical Cloud. I don't think it's a matter of if but when. Grim. [0] https://corticallabs.com/cloud https://corticallabs.com/cloud
- Gecko4072 3mo agoVery interesting. We have an organic experiment converging to maximum stimulation in short form videos (which will become the majority of training data for future video gen models) Already approaching the capabilities of a “mood organ” from blade runner. Except usually most people don’t even make the choice to change their mood anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_...
- Unearned5161 3mo agoThis is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting. This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”. The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model. The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
- da_grift_shift 3mo ago>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is. It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons. It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down. “It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon-moonbug-entertainment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-children-television-youtube-netflix https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-chil... What a world.
- aswegs8 3mo agoI know a technology like that was used ~20 years ago for ADHD. EEG feedback, as soon as the kid looks away or zones out, the movie stops playing.
- pona-a 3mo agoThe title reads a lot like the lab logs you'd find in a horror game. But for the paper itself, it seems they're using genetic optimization over predefined keywords. Wonder what would happen if they did gradient descent on the latent space directly. Is brain stimulation just not a good domain for GD?
- ben_w 3mo ago> Is brain stimulation just not a good domain for GD? The largest LLMs right now are at best 1% the number of parameters of a human brain. "At best" if synapses are one parameter each, real ones are probably more than that, but nobody's entirely sure yet.
- dnpls 3mo agoThe whole site looks AI generated. Those 3D brains are... smooth.
- JoelTheNewGuy 3mo agoFuture looks bright....
- pockybum522 3mo agoInventing Snow Crash. Neat.
- stymaar 3mo agoSee Zuck, the metaverse failed, but who said the mind control part couldn't work?
- sph 3mo agoFuck this and whoever is driving this type of research. We’re increasingly living in a world designed by sociopaths. What do these people think this research will be used for? I wish we had the Hippocratic oath for STEM, or at least that they would take ethics seriously rather than an afterthought against the god of Progress at all costs.
- br121 3mo agoThere are ethical use cases for this research. The first that comes to mind is mapping the brain before a surgery. Right now some surgeries are made with the patient concious to verify that relevant brain damages are not being done. Having a deeper knowledge of the patient's brain before the surgery may decrease risks further. The bad scenario (using targeted content to hook the user to a screen) already exists, it's not like it can get that worse (or at least so I hope)
- NoGravitas 3mo ago> There are ethical use cases for this research. Of course there are. Given what you know about the society we live in, do you think those will be the primary use cases that will be pursued?
- pfdietz 3mo agoSo, AI images to maximally drive reward centers in the brain? What could possibly go wrong?
- aubanel 3mo agoThis is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to surgically hit all the switches in the viewer's brain and turn it into a zombie hooked for days on end. Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.
- barrenko 3mo agoWe are doing to our brains and our children the same thing we are doing to pigs in cages, squezeeing every last cent until the planet burns down.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago> until the planet burns down. Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things
- malfist 3mo agoYou say that, but run away greenhouse gases can sterilize the entire planet, like Venus.
- inigyou 3mo agoFortunately that particular extreme scenario doesn't seem likely. Radiance scales with the fourth power of temperature, and we're not filling the atmosphere with Venus levels of sulfuric acid. Our CO2 output will be self-limiting when it kills us and we stop outputting it.
- NoGravitas 3mo ago
- anon-3988 3mo agoI am not sure if we should want to understand how our brain works. This is why I don't like libertarian free will people. We need to accept that we don't have free will. Otherwise we will study the brain thinking that we are above it. No. We are soon going to find out exactly how the brain works and I am not sure people understand what that means.
- uniqueuid 3mo agoAmong my secret research ideas, this is the most dangerous and morally wrong one. If future generations of researchers will wonder why IRB reviews became mandatory for computer science, studies like this will be the answer. Seriously, some people don't seem to realize the point at which they are becoming Fritz Haber.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoIn general, technology has always decreased our liberty though
- akramachamarei 3mo agoAre you serious?
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoIt's hard to enslave your fellow man without a bigger stick
- akramachamarei 3mo agoYou're talking about superiority of technology, not technology itself.
- arm32 3mo agoDescribing some of our colleagues as "becoming Fritz Haber" is a highly deep and accurate cut that I will 100% be stealing from you.
- nathias 3mo agoCustomized propaganda made for the individual is the only thing I'm afraid of. Right now its easy to avoid the farm trolls that harves boomers minds on facebook, but given the costs go down and tech improves, we each of us have a trollfarm working specifically for us and that would make it extremely hard to not get brainwashed.
- dzdt 3mo agoAee they trying to create snow crash for real??? [1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/184341/in-the-novel-snow-crash-why-would-anyone-willingly-take-that-drug#comment499977_184341 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/184341/in-the-nove...
- otekengineering 3mo agoor perhaps infinite jest once it hits tiktok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest > a film, Infinite Jest, also called "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die.
- evanjrowley 3mo agoFor a video to _literally_ maximally drive a target brain region there would be fatal consequences - e.g. the plot of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996).
- _qua 3mo agoI can imagine truly horrifying images coming out of this. Many people who have spent a lot of time online have come across unfortunate gore images that they may have seen for only a fraction of a second that they wish they could unsee. One can imagine the brain is able to see much worse.
- tavavex 3mo agoJune 9, 2032: ReMind, a new biotech startup, has opened to a recordbreaking IPO after a demo and a series of small-scale trials that stunned the world. The company is pioneering a new way to ingrain memories into the human brain - each ReMind screen is equipped with a special camera that can quickly recognize anyone who walks up to it, and ReMind's secret sauce algorithm is able to use past data of each user to generate imagery that will have the most profound impact on their brains. They claim that the algorithm is highly effective, being able to burn in imagery into the viewer's brains with an average accuracy of 83% per viewing. The CEO has promised to launch two services to start: ReMind Long-term, which focuses on creating imagery that simulates a 'traumatic' impression for creating long-term memories, which will be immensely useful for advertisers; as well as ReMind Short-term, for milder experiences that resemble a catchy song in a visual format for a quick boost in sales for a limited-time promotion. Advertising companies around the world have already placed tens of thousands of sales and deployment of ReMind-equipped screens is planned to begin immediately. Look forward to spotting one in your grocery store, in an elevator, on gas stations, on in-flight entertainment systems and in place of billboards on public spaces. The future is looking bright for ReMind!
- shmeeed 3mo agoWe're edging ever closer to Langford's Basilisk.
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- ajb 3mo agoAn anecdote, but some reason to think that overworking part of your brain is a bad idea: I had an Aunt who had dementia. This is obviously a terrible outlook. But her and my Uncle seemed to be doing okay. My Uncle was an ultra-competent guy, highly stable, the person you could rely on; and had been his whole adult life. So it was shocking when he had a mental breakdown and became manic. There was probably something physical going on, but what was also going on was that he had wanted my aunt to be able to live normally for as long as possible, so had been covering everything - for a year or more he'd had to be alert 7 days a week in case my aunt tried to cook on the gas stove or something like that, at which she was no longer safe. So the risk-alert part of his brain had been constantly overworked. I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoI bet it wasn't overwork, it was the fight or flight response being constantly activated for your uncle when he's caring for your aunt who could do anything unpredictably.
- akramachamarei 3mo ago> I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled. What's to gain in doing so?
- tikimcfee 3mo agoI will state plainly that I do not think you are asking this maliciously, and that instead you are asking from curiosity. From that perspective, though, I am a bit flabbergasted. Are you truly curious as to how it might not be A Good Thing that those engaging in high-finance capitalistic money making programs would have access to forcefully engaging a human being's brain into activity, with or without their consent, to such an extent as to drive motivations and bias neuronal activation that leads to what they think is a choice? Said another way: Are you really curious as to how allowing a company additional tools to bias human interactions may not be A Good Thing? If you need an example as to how this is clearly not A Good Thing, and that at least a portion of the world population agrees with that characteristic, that there are currently companies that have tried to actively do this already, and attempts are being made at least to fine them for their behavior as an attempt to curb it. Whether or not it succeeds is a question of governance at the moment since the US is currently under plutocratic control. However, I would really urge you to explore this topic and really engage with what's happening due to the plutocratic class' capabilities over technologic change and societally enforced or biased adoption, and how they, in many extreme cases that are continuing to become more extreme, are not A Good Thing. Simplest, most readily available example: https://ground.news/article/meta-says-us-states-are-seeking-14-trillion-in-penalties-in-august-youth-safety-trial https://ground.news/article/meta-says-us-states-are-seeking-...
- alexpotato 3mo agoWhat's interesting is that the process of identifying what gets human attention is nothing new. e.g. cartoons from the 1950s were designed to have: - cute animals - short and fast scene cuts - catchy music b/c all three of the above were known to trick the human brain into "sit still and observe" mode. Focus groups did the same thing for advertising which then morphed into A/B testing to determine revealed preferences. Same thing with the whole fat/salt/sugar research that led to near addictive fast food. This is just the next logical step.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoBooks are designed to be addictive. People said the same things about books as they say about screens nowadays. I think it's more important to understand the emotional hysteria people get themselves into
- alexpotato 3mo agoMy favorite addiction epidemic was when apparently the "catch the ball on the string in the cup" took over parts of Europe to the point that people were ignoring their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball
- voltaireodactyl 3mo agoOne difference to consider: books require active participation on the part of the consumer. Whereas digital/screens can just happen to you whether you participate or not.
- djaro 3mo agoBooks are not nearly as addictive as social media though.
- niemandhier 3mo agoA portion of young men already are more or less addicted to pornographic content. Tolls like this have the potential to make this so much worse.
- akramachamarei 3mo agoCould you elaborate? Esp. on the "more or less" bit. E.g. I can't imagine you take away porn and more than 100 people experience withdrawal.
- yomismoaqui 3mo agoLudovico Technique as a service
- jrmg 3mo agoI’ll leave it to other comments to discuss the societal and moral implications of being able to do this (which, I agree, ick…). On a practical level: We train an encoding model, a “digital twin”, that predicts how each visual region responds to any video. Now we can ask: which video would make a chosen region light up the most? NEvo searches for that video automatically, using the twin’s prediction as its reward. I only scanned the paper, so maybe I missed it, but is there any confirmation that this ‘digital twin’ works? Like, do the generated videos actually cause the same patterns as in the ‘digital twin’ brain model in real humans in an MRI machine? My instinct is to be skeptical that it’s possible to reliably create a video -> brain activation prediction model.
- sonicvroooom 3mo ago... and shouldn't this backfire hard? All the signals that are missed by the (f)MRI are never "mirrored" in the digital twin even though on screen it will look like it. Bam, Experimenter Bias in the machine and I don't know how to phrase it but ... does this method/experiment leave any wiggle room for Falsifiability? Even if the Hawthorne Effect does not apply to humans, it most certainly translates onto the brain and sensory (post)-processing-- live and remembered (vs in-memory, stored), real, virtual or imagined. ... I just realized how vastly different peripherals are when real, remembered, virtual or imagined sensory input is (post-)processed ... It feels more like the machine will reproduce a superficial pattern. And at least some signal streams echoing in the brain on input from the digital twin won't emerge because the digital twin has only part of the data. And that's a premise for an unnoticeable rewiring of what once used to fire together, ... given a hell of a lot of exposure, of course, ... or not ... let's see EDIT n: the paper says pretty much all that in like ... science, bitch! Epic stuff.
- SubiculumCode 3mo agoyeah. This is one of those things where they used previously collected data, built a model that has validity on modeling validity between simulation and actual brain (encoding model for digital twin), then built a new model using the encoding model that tries to reliably activate particular brain regions. The next obvious step is to validate this back to the original person, but they will need to collect new data, and so likely, will need to get research funding. One step at a time. The digital twin types of models will become more and more useful, but I don't think we will be at the point where all research will be done entirely within these models. They can be fun to play with btw: https://www.thevirtualbrain.org/tvb/zwei/ https://www.thevirtualbrain.org/tvb/zwei/ and they don't require a beast of a machine to run.
- truthbe 3mo agoWhat's next, a movie you watch and die in 7 days?
- shmeeed 3mo agoAh great, work on the Torment Nexus is progressing well. I can head into the weekend with peace of mind.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nirvael 3mo agoI actually had a similar idea that I cam across in my own research in brain-to-video applications. You could theoretically train the model in real-time by using brain data as a reward signal, such that the model would find the image or video that most strongly produces the desired response (e.g. an increase in certain brainwave bands associated with pleasure, or alertness, or fear). I can imagine this has some very undesirable usecases if used in the wrong way.
- doodlesarefun 3mo agoGoal state lol: https://www.afternow.io/content/images/2016/10/virtual_reality-2.jpg https://www.afternow.io/content/images/2016/10/virtual_reali...
- Quarrelsome 3mo agoI'm pretty sure by blindly following this path to commercial success in marketing; we're just gonna end up with content that is as implicitly adjacent to porn as possible without being explicit.
- jerlendds 3mo agoThe sci-fi hand wringing is embarrassing. A huge chunk of the population is afflicted with mental health issues and the best psychitrists can seem to do is "Oh bro, wanna try some ketamine? Anti-psychotics?? Maybe some SSRIs, how about psychdelics?!" - this is a joke. Im all for more neuroscience research in every form because our contemporary understanding is embarassingly poor. This is a research tool for understanding what visual brain regions encode, not a mind-control device. Better models of brain function may eventually improve diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Calling every neuroscience advance "Black Mirror" is not ethical insight. It saddens me the reaction so many commentors have here, it is just lazy technological illiteracy imo.
- NoGravitas 3mo agoIn a society that wasn't visibly hell-bent on monetizing every discovery in a cartoonishly evil way, I'd probably agree with you.
- clarionbell 3mo agoI can see lot of potential in this, but I somehow doubt it's going to be used for good.
- ryss20 3mo ago[flagged]
- ballislife30 3mo agoAbsolutely horifying.
- AyyEye 3mo agoLet's stop pretending that we can separate the good from the bad here. This industry and everyone in it is morally bankrupt.
- armchairhacker 3mo agoI’m skeptical. I’m always skeptical of these papers that claim to read minds, because my understanding is current brain reading technology is very coarse (Neuralink is SOTA, very invasive, and only 1-3 thousand electrodes for 55-70 billion of neurons; fMRI is much worse) and neural networks generate plausible images and videos from noise. Indeed, the example videos don’t seem particularly stimulating, just random.
- CGMthrowaway 3mo ago[flagged]
- KeiferWise 3mo agoSomeone should use this to make the "Infinite Jest" film from the book "Infinite Jest"
- Zopieux 3mo agoThe trope of vibe coded pages adding this slide-up transition on every paragraph needs to die yesterday.
- shiggydump 3mo agoCould be great for therapy, but who am I kidding, this shit's going to be abused for profit and addiction.
- sizzle 3mo agoThis… wow… should be tightly regulated and illegal to use on the general population. Literally hijacking people’s neural activation pathways on a mass scale that can’t be easily blocked, unless you look away or start meditating. Are there any other precedents for this kind of neural-subterfuge being released into the wild, effectively lowering the barrier to mass manipulation?
- terekhindc 3mo agois the target activation actually measured against per-subject fMRI, or optimized only against the encoder model? the landing page is ambiguous and it changes what the whole result means.