🇮🇱 👁 Israeli institute unveils AI ‘mind-reading’ tool, vows to push its powers further A new AI tool developed by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science can determine what a person is looking at simply by analyzing their brain scans and reconstruct the image. It can also predict a person's brain activity based on what they are looking at, according to the project's authors. 🤔 What's behind the technology? It uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reconstruct what people see and infer brain activity. fMRI tracks changes in oxygen-rich blood flow, highlighting areas that become more active. The researchers trained an AI model on existing data from people who viewed around 9,000 images while undergoing high-resolution fMRI scans. They also trained an encoder to predict brain activity from an image, then combined the two models to refine the final reconstruction. The resulting decoder, they say, needs just one hour of fMRI data from a new person before it can predict what they are seeing. The researchers now aim to move beyond static images, exploring whether the technology can decode video and audio – and eventually reveal what people imagine, think about or even dream. ✡️ Possible future applications Professor Michal Irani, whose lab developed the “mind-reading” AI model Brain-IT, says the tool could help people with disabilities such as paralysis and aid research into various mental disorders. But scientists warn the technology could eventually extract information from people’s brains without consent. They also envisage using reconstructed mental images as legal evidence in investigations and even in courts. 👍 Substack | Chat | @geopolitics_prime