Researchers Getting Better at Reading Minds
mhajicek writes:
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-people-see-reading-their-brain-scans
As neuroscientists struggle to demystify how the human brain converts what our eyes see into mental images, artificial intelligence (AI) has been getting better at mimicking that feat. A recent study, scheduled to be presented at an upcoming computer vision conference, demonstrates that AI can read brain scans and re-create largely realistic versions of images a person has seen. As this technology develops, researchers say, it could have numerous applications, from exploring how various animal species perceive the world to perhaps one day recording human dreams and aiding communication in people with paralysis.
Many labs have used AI to read brain scans and re-create images a subject has recently seen, such as human faces and photos of landscapes. The new study marks the first time an AI algorithm called Stable Diffusion, developed by a German group and publicly released in 2022, has been used to do this. Stable Diffusion is similar to other text-to-image "generative" AIs such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, which produce new images from text prompts after being trained on billions of images associated with text descriptions.
For the new study, a group in Japan added additional training to the standard Stable Diffusion system, linking additional text descriptions about thousands of photos to brain patterns elicited when those photos were observed by participants in brain scan studies.
[...] Finally, the researchers tested their system on additional brain scans from the same participants when they viewed a separate set of photos, including a toy bear, airplane, clock, and train. By comparing the brain patterns from those images with those produced by the photos in the training data set, the AI system was able to produce convincing imitations of the novel photos. (The team posted a preprint of its work in December 2022.)
"The accuracy of this new method is impressive," says Iris Groen, a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work.
I'm wondering how this sort of ability will effect copyright, in the long term, when it becomes possible to extract high-enough fidelity copies of media from people's brains, which they have observed before and remember. If someone views an image, listens to a song, or watches a movie, and then downloads a copy from their brain to share, is that copyright infringement? Is the copy in their head infringement? Will the law determine a percentage fidelity limit?
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