Decoding your Thoughts: Can AI read your Mind? - Studium Generale - Tilburg University
Channel: TilburgUniversity
Date: 10/10/2023

It has recently been demonstrated that Artificial Intelligence can recover the meaning of perceived and imagined language from non-invasive brain recordings. Is this just clever engineering or should we be worried that AI will soon be reading our minds? (English / SG-Certificate*)

Into the corners of our minds
Picture this: you're sitting in a cozy armchair, thinking about how amazing it would be to sip on your favorite beverage, and voila! Your phone automatically places a home delivery order at your favorite local barista, seamlessly translating your thoughts into actions. Just think it, and AI will do the rest. Such a personal thought-to-text translator is obviously still very much science fiction, but new technological advancements in AI have brought this scenario a bit closer. Researchers from the University of Texas in Austin have succeeded in using artificial intelligence to extract text from the brain activity of individuals. They developed a specific algorithm, which was trained using fMRI brain scans of participants listening to podcasts for up to 16 hours. In subsequent tests, the decoder was able to generate text that closely approximated the content of a story the participants listened to.


Debating the ethical issues
While not being true mind-reading yet, it resembles something eerily close. The method therefore immediately raises ethical questions, especially regarding invasion of privacy, consent, autonomy, misinterpretation and manipulation. But also think of security issues: what if thought-decoding technology falls into the wrong hands? However, it could also be put to good use, for example to communicate with people with locked-in syndrome, or for making mental health diagnoses more precise, expanding the boundaries of human communication.

Symposium
Watch this symposium, during which we explain the possibilities and impossibilities of AI ‘mind-reading’, demystifying the neuroscience behind the "brain decoding" of language. We explore all the steps involved in the mapping of brain activity to linguistic meaning, showing how a clever combination of neuroimaging methods, large language models, and machine learning, allows for the decoding of paragraphs of continuous language. Not only when people listen to short stories, but also when they imagine them, or when they watch silent videos. Next to this, we look into whether the established framework of human rights is able to offer adequate protection to the autonomy over our minds. Are novel human rights, like a right to mental self-determination, perhaps necessary? Should they include protection from unconsented interferences with the mind, instead of only protecting the body, as is currently the case? And what about the philosophical and ethical issues that arise from the use of neural technologies and brain–computer interfaces to perform so-called "mind-reading"? In particular, how do current results impact debates about the nature of the mind? And how do these debates highlight concerns about how scientists and science-communicators effectively disseminate their results to the public? Noortje Venhuizen is the moderator of this symposium. 

Speakers
00:00:00 Introduction (Noortje Verhuizen)
00:03:40 Harm Brouwer
00:29:30 Nathan Wildman
00:54:50 Sjors Ligthart
01:16:55 Panel Discussion

This symposium is organized by Studium Generale in cooperation with study associations Sapientia Ludenda, Enigma and ELSA.

* For students, this lecture may count towards the SG-Certificate. Check the SG-Certificate website for all the terms and conditions: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/campus/studium-generale/students/certificate-studium-generale