How smart is artificial intelligence getting? You might want to sit down for this one.
A group of researchers in Japan have used it in an incredible way: human subjects looked at an image and kept thinking on it, then artificial intelligence read their minds.
On the left, what the human was looking at. All other images are what AI determined they were looking at.
Pretty crazy, isn't it?
"We have been studying methods to reconstruct or recreate what a person is seeing just by looking at the person's brain activity," says one of the scientists involved.
"Our previous method was to assume that an image consists of pixels or simple shapes. But it's known that our brain processes visual information hierarchically extracting different levels of features or components of different complexities," a researcher from Kyoto University told CNBC.
Now in this image (to the right), the top and colorful shapes are what the human subjects looked at and were thinking on.
The image below each shape is what AI created as it read the human mind and decoded it.
You can just begin to imagine some of the implications here, can't you? Especially as this technology gets better and better.
It kind of reminds us of those scenes from Star Wars where someone touches the other person and can see what they're thinking—their secret is taken visually without them needing to say a word.
Of course that was a movie. This is real life research. Do you think this is a good thing?
