AI learns from brain signals to create personalized attractive faces

> If the goal is to personalize attractive faces, you could just have subjects rate pictures on a scale of 1-100.

However, research in the field (the field here is really "interactive genetic algorithms") suggests that it's more efficient/better HCI to allow selection rather than numerical rating, in order to choose the "parents" of the next generation. So, the right way to do this would be a typical interactive GA, using a mouse. Or eye-tracking, for lazy users.

This was also my takeway.

The indirection of focusing on more attractive faces seems to purely exist to be able to say that attractiveness response was measured by brains can rather than statements from the subject, which it was not.

Actually measuring attractiveness by way of neural response would be quite interesting, as it præcludes an ability to lie.

There is some discussion about how much people find attractive what they say they find attractive, and whether or not they are lying and instead are saying what they are expected to find attractive to appear more socially gracious; — such research would be able to compare the difference between what a man says, and what he thinks, which never fails to produce interesting contrasts.

>If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces.

Yeah, as you say, it'd be very interesting if it could first associate self-reports of attractiveness with EEG activity, and then know roughly how attractive you consider someone based solely on blind EEG data. Then reverse the process by generating lots of faces and picking the one that someone seems to be most attracted to purely based on their EEG. (This is what I initially thought the study would be doing.)

I suspect there would be major challenges with this, though. Besides EEG data possibly being too coarse, it's possible that what happens in the brain when you see someone you find attractive is very complicated and multifaceted. I think "attractiveness" may not be a single metric along a gradient even for a single individual's brain, let alone among a population. So even training on each person individually might not be that fruitful.

For example, you may find two different people attractive due to a mix of reasons - some shared reasons, and some differing reasons. I'd guess the brain activity might differ in some ways in those cases. Maybe also even while looking at different photos of the same person, or even the same photo at different times.

I know people tend to go through hormone cycles throughout the day; it's possible activity (as well as subjective attractiveness perception at a given time) may differ depending on what phase of a cycle you're in, or food, coffee, or alcohol you've had recently, etc.

But who knows, maybe there often is some consistent pattern of activity which would serve as a decent proxy for overall attractiveness perception, if it could just be sifted out of the noise. This is probably just extremely difficult to do with current technology and neuroscience understanding, even if it may be feasible in theory. I'm sure we'll see more things like that in the coming decades.

People lie, especially in matters of attraction - eg it is still not safe (legally or culturally ) to be a homosexual in much of the world (including swaths of the US). Thus the EEG-based “mind reading” approach. There’s still much work to be done, clearly , but “simply asking people” is anything but straightforward.

> Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess.

I imagine that would define hot mess.

Very insightful vision of a (proto-?)wireheading future.

I suspect something similar to this may eventually be developed for AI-generated music, too. A kind of superstimulus or wirehead music that initially sounds strange and unintelligible but soon proves to be more pleasurable than anything you've ever heard before. Maybe even trained on and tailored to each individual's brain, to maximize pleasure and reward peaks. Perhaps with a little bit of optional user input, like sliders for fast, slow, bright, dark, intense, soft, "dopaminergically flat vs. spiky", etc.

> undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain

Is there any science behind this being possible? I would have thought morphing blob of porn-shapes would be more realistic.

Sounds like heroin.

Thankfully, I will be among the large subset of the population which will be immune, as, per deep learning tradition, the data set the GAN will be trained on inevitably won't include any fats, blacks, or non-binaries.

Despite the high probability of it leading to some weird dystopia, I suspect some government will try implementing a national ML-powered dating service at some point (especially if birth rates continue to drop in developed countries). Two examples of governments getting involved in the dating market are from Japan[0] and Iran[1].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-s...

[1] https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/article.php?story=iran-la...

Or even more of a fit, there is a scene in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" where a character meets a person while wearing AR/VR goggles as part of a piece of performance art. An algorithm gradually tweaks the performer's appearance by measuring his brain activity until the performer seems dazzlingly attractive. It sounds almost exactly like the technology being described here, to the point where I wonder if one of the authors read that novel.

It is absolutely far fetched as far as I'm concerned. To me it is more plausible the new generation will not even care about insta/snapchat/tiktok. Do people still care about snapchat? Not sure about magic AI generated disposable entertainment either. I don't see it as feasible and even if it was, people would soon learn to filter it just like we filter spam and ads.

I expect that today's social media paradigm will be recognized as harmful, just like Fast Food and Porn. Sure, sometimes you want to get that fix, but at that point its long-term utility will have degraded to nothing, so it's not something people will want to be addicted to.