Researchers from National University of Singapore said that they have developed a technology through which minds can be read .

AI research participant Li Ruilin who got his brain scanned in an MRI machine said, "I'm also interested in what happened in my brain and what my brain can output and what I'm thinking. So I try to participate and to see what really happened on my brain."

The technology will allow a computer to 'read' his thoughts and re-create the visuals in his mind.

Li is one of potentially up to 58 participants who have volunteered their brain scan datasets to researchers working on developing a mind-reading AI.

The technique relies on scanning the brains of volunteers in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, where they are exposed to between 1,200 and 5,000 different images.

An individual AI model for each participant is created after the brain scans are associated with the images using the mind-reading AI, called MinD-Vis.

Jiaxin Qing, one of the lead researchers on the study said, "So after we collect enough training data for you, we can create an individual AI model for you, and this AI model is kind of a translator. It can understand your brain activities just like ChatGPT understand the natural languages of humans."

The "mind reading" kicks in when the same participant comes in again for a brain scan.

"So next time you come in, you will do the scan and in the scan you will see the visual stimuli like this. And then we'll record your brain activities at the same time. And your brain activities will go into our AI translator and this translator will translate your brain activities into a special language that a Stable Diffusion can understand, and then it will generate the images you are seeing at that point. So that's basically how we can read your mind in this sense."

The technology is not able to mind-read the general public yet. Unlike scenes from science fiction movies, this AI system is modelled to individual participants.

And there are also the possible risks of the datasets being assessed without consent and the relative lack of legislations in AI research.

Juan Helen Zhou, Associate Professor at NUS Medicine said, "The privacy concerns is the first important thing and then people might be worried, whether the information we provided here might be assessed or shared without prior consent. So the thing to address this is we should have very strict guidelines, ethical and and law in terms of how to protect the privacy."

Still the scientists are excited about the possibilities of a mind-reading AI system.

One of the lead researchers Chen Zijiao explained, "Say for some subject, some patients without motor ability. Maybe we can help him to like control their robots (artificial limbs), and their phone, like communicate with, communicate with others like just using their thoughts instead of speech if that person couldn't speak at that time."

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(Edited by : Keshav Singh Chundawat)