Scientists Use GPT AI to Passively Read People's Thoughts in Breakthrough
vice.com
vice.com
When you lose privacy you lose ownership over your own thoughts. You lose agency over the direction of your own life.
Humanity suffers by either scenario, either by our own agency in control of power we are not prepared to manage or we will be managed by power that we can not control.
Many have their focus looking forward to the unknown concerns of AGI; however, these other issues are already nearly imminent and are far less present in discourse around AI.
The impacts on socialization and society in general from AI performing exactly as we have requested it may be one of the greatest threats. I've written quite a bit on that aspect, FYI - https://dakara.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-ai-end...
So much of human life is tied to the reward of the sense of accomplishment, and AI threatens that in a meaningful way. From large things, like seeing a piece of software you built ship and get used, or seeing your child graduate from college after years of hard work raising them, to the small things, like even eating a delicious meal you cooked yourself.
When machines are not only offering to solve problems and perform actions for us, but are reading are thoughts and doing everything for us before we even make an attempt, I worry that sense of accomplishment will become ever less frequent.
And while we can compensate for machines taking jobs through, eg, universal basic income or the like, how we can solve for machines replacing struggle, perseverance, and accomplishment is still very much TBD.
"AI brings into question who is really the creator. Am I the creator if I simply role the dice until I win the lottery? When I regenerate a new response over and over until finally getting the image or output I most desire? When the output is the final product, is AI still just a tool? Or are we simply observers foolishly convincing ourselves of the value of our contribution?"
This latter type is already heading our way and I posted a comment about it a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35850279
If someone is working on a handheld device that can perform MRI-level scans from across the room, I would be worried about the privacy implications of that technology, not AI.
Facial expression analysis, all of your online conversations, the existence of your entire life is being monitored and recorded. There will be enough data to perceive beyond the veil into the thoughts of the mind.
The device itself is very small, battery-powered (for safety) and requires that you attach electrodes to your scalp.
MRIs may very well follow a similar trajectory over time.
Personally, I don't think this will happen in the very near future -- but history shows us time and time again that it's good to start thinking about these things well before they become practical.
MRI machines operate by creating intense magnetic fields. In order to create those magnetic fields, you need superconductors, otherwise the magnets would burn up. Thus the liquid helium.
To make this accessible to the hobbyist, you need a revolution in physics, not informatics or engineering. Not saying that it's impossible, but if someone does develop room temperature superconductors, we're going to be talking about a lot more exciting things than handheld MRI machines.
I'm reminded of what a physicist once told me: if a physicist says something is impossible, give up all hope. If a physicist says something is uneconomical/impractical/infeasible, then there is still hope because economics change over time.
> To make this accessible to the hobbyist, you need a revolution in physics, not informatics or engineering.
The big stumbling block in terms of doing this on an (advanced) hobbyist level is the need for liquid helium and rare metals. That's an economic problem, not a physics problem. The helium is a really big deal -- but it's also the one that is most likely to have the economics change in, because the helium shortage is a serious issue and there are lots of people looking into ways to manufacture it efficiently. If they succeed, helium may end up becoming cheap enough to be within the realm of possibility for advanced hobbyists.
Also, the only reason that helium is needed at all is because MRI machines require superconductivity to work. It's not impossible that an advance in that field could happen such that you don't need to make things as cold as liquid helium in order to achieve it.
> we're going to be talking about a lot more exciting things than handheld MRI machines.
Hand-held? Why do they have to be hand-held? I'm just talking about ordinary people being able to build one at all, not how portable it would be.
I'm trying to figure out which part of this threat model AI makes a meaningful difference in. If they already have you captive, the xkcd-certified $5 wrench is cheaper.
"End of private thought" doesn't seem to be on this tech tree, unless you posit being able to scan people secretly or against their will.
If someone comes up with a technology that allows people's minds to be read without their cooperation, then I'd start to worry -- but I see nothing in this that indicates that's where things are going.
Also, the idea of building my own MRI appeals to me, so my mind went on a little tangent about how to make that happen.
That we can correlate thought with incredibly precise and detailed electrochemical phenomenon in your brain should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone with a materialist view of the universe. Your thoughts are, after all, electrochemical phenomenon. The problem - still - is measuring them.
The idea that AI is going to somehow read your mind from macro phenomenon like facial expressions and the width of your iris is total bullshit made up by people who want to sell TV shows. We already have this kind of "technology" in the form of polygraphs - and they have the same effectiveness as horoscopes.
In this respect, any further loss is of significant concern.
https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-re...
>Auxetics-Inspired Tunable Metamaterials for Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Anyways, even given current limitations, I'd likely side with the very researchers working on such. They explicitly highlight privacy reasons as a serious concern. Going out of their way to highlight misuse through bypassing requirements (cooperation of subject) and intentionally misinterpreting for nefarious reasons.
Honestly, it baffles me that so many people on a site devoted to technology evaluate long-term trends based on current capabilities. Capacity is going to continue to double every ~2 years. If we can't make transistors 2x smaller, we'll find a different architecture to make transistor arrays 2x larger, or [something].
Technical progress compounds. It's often lumpy rather than linear, but it's going to keep imposing an accelerating effect wherever people see profit in applying it.
the article suggests it could be accomplished with a neurosurgical implant as well - and which, honestly, if I could transcribe my thoughts to review later, I'd love to try that out. In which case, the question of security moves to the matter of accessing the implant.
It is not just that. The mandate to privacy is anterior (and ancient), in terms of "do not expose yourself to the judgement of the ignorant".
If that's the case, then we have almost no meaningful privacy. Fortunately, that doesn't have to be the case.
If I go out in public, people can see me, sure. But the odds of any of those people knowing who I am are miniscule. To them, I'm just another body in the bulk of bodies that populate their landscape. My privacy is retained.
It's when cameras are everywhere, recording everyone they see, when we carry devices that report our locations to others, etc., and that data is correlated with other data, that privacy is compromised.
Reading the discussion in the paper, it looks like if you lie "out loud" in your head about what you're thinking, you'll fool the interpretation. For now.
Of course that can change -- will almost certainly change as the technology improves. But it's an important caveat at the moment and the researchers clearly paid attention to this aspect.
Things like this have been tried before to help lock-in patents, unfortunately things like ALS seem to correlate with a weakening of those patterns.
If you're playing a VR game, you probably aren't using your inner voice to articulate your secrets. Although if you are of great importance and interest to people with sufficient resources, they might be able to trick you into doing so in a game world.
Moreover, I'm skeptical this can be significantly improved as fMRI is quite a blunt instrument when it comes to assessing brain activity; it is a delayed and course-grained view of relatively large volumes of aggregated brain tissue.
...yet.
Funny - with all this mind reading, youtube won't autocomplete the query "WEF mind reading" for me.
> The decoder produced more accurate results during the tests with audio recordings, compared to the imagined speech, but it was still able to glean some basic details of unspoken thoughts from the brain activity. For instance, when a subject envisioned the sentence “went on a dirt road through a field of wheat and over a stream and by some log buildings,” the decoder produced text that said “he had to walk across a bridge to the other side and a very large building in the distance.”
It sounds like it's reading a persons snapshot of the story in a visually-descriptive language. That's really neat! I can imagine this is the beginning of telepathy.
So far it only works with words. I'm wondering how soon it could work with pictures, so you could imagine a willow tree and the machine shows a willow tree on a screen. A powerful daydreamer could make movies without a camera.
Of course if you want to get a lot of press, use the term "GPT"
People who are paralyzed or suffering from neurodegenerative diseases might have a chance of regaining independence. New treatments for mental health diseases could be a benefit as well.
The thin line of privacy will disintegrate into nothing.
And frankly, that might be for the best. Imagine whatever country is most antagonistic toward your own, and now imagine their military fully develops this and yours doesn't. How safe/secure are you feeling?
I don't think I'd feel (or be) much less safe/secure if an antagonistic nation developed such a thing and mine didn't. I would certainly feel less safe and secure if my nation had this capability regardless of whether or not others did.
Out of concern for data leakage to third-parties, my employer gave employees access to an internal-only Azure instance of GPT3.5.
The next thing they did was enable logging of all queries. Security collects the data, but forwards it to the analytics group for reasons even I don't know.
Tread lightly with WorkplaceGPT if you don't want your employer to "read your mind" and make future RIF decisions based on your AI-obfuscated incompetence.
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only”
That song, btw, was somewhat prescient of today’s Intrusive Advertising Industrial Complex:
“Advertising signs they con You into thinking you’re the one That can do what’s never been done That can win what’s never been won Meantime life outside goes on All around you”
Not exactly sure what the 'its just a fad' crowd thinks about this + the Hollywood strikes.
Imagine, for example, being gay in a state that has harsh penalties for being so.
Or Theocracies that are not friendly to minority religions.
And that's just the more obvious examples.
Godwin's Law really needs to be updated to account for the gay persecution complex. Any state that corrupt would have a cheaper and easier time just tickling you until you confess.
Previous decoding of neural signals was barely able to meet us half way, that is the subject also adapted to get the desired results and maybe the receiver learned a bit too.
The receiver just got a major upgrade..
That may be correct, but from an ethical point of view, it's completely bankrupt. People who justify doing things they know to be unethical on the basis that someone else will just do it anyway are, of course, being unethical even if they are correct.
Even worse are those people who think others will do it anyway, so it's better if they themselves (obviously being good people) do it instead of those other, terrible people.
Hard not to think about potential applications when it comes to legal proceedings and court evidence.
In fact now that I think about it, even 'pleading the 5th' can be worked around using this type of setup.
Most people believe that polygraphs have some amount of validity, and that's a problem that means they continue to get used and continue to do harm.
They have a much higher rate of false positive than false negative. That makes them useful in circumstances where your primary concern is, say, eliminating risky hires for jobs accessing sensitive data -- you may lose lots of good candidates, but your concern isn't fairness.
From my reading, the tl;dr is that they:
- Build a subject-specific model to predict fMRI activations when presenting a subject with words
(I don't believe this is novel in and of itself. I know it has been done with ECoG - [1] off the top of my head but I am fairly certain there are others. so maybe using fMRI is the main advance here?)
- Use GPT to generate candidate sentences, and see which candidates most match the true activations.
(This method of narrowing the solution space seems new.)
The improvement on within-subject accuracy over between subject leads me to believe that this is an actual benefit, but I'm struggling to determine how they quantify the improvements over and above "GPT is good at predicting human language".
I may be misunderstanding the approach altogether however, so take this with a grain of salt.
[1]: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/07/420946/neuroprosthesis-res...
-- transformer