Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

news.utexas.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#31

Post by [deleted] »

walderf wrote: post #30
flangola7 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you seriously just link the Wikipedia articles for... microwaves and the EM spectrum? In one sentence, what is the concrete point you are making?

i did. it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question. as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.

[deleted]

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#32

Post by spidersenses »

walderf wrote: post #30
flangola7 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you seriously just link the Wikipedia articles for... microwaves and the EM spectrum? In one sentence, what is the concrete point you are making?

i did. it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question. as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.

This is not meant as a personal attack, but reading your comments in this thread, it leaves me with the impression that you may be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

A condition which, if remaining untreated, could eventually make you a danger to yourself and loved ones.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#33

Post by sjducb »

devsda wrote: post #27

For now the system has to be trained per person. Is the difference in brain activity across individuals significant enough to stop building a universal model? It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.

Obviously this is pure speculation, but I suspect it'll be a lot like cloning someone's voice. The first systems required the participant to read thousands of lines of text. Now you can do it over a phone call without the participant noticing that you're cloning their voice.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#35

Post by hammyhavoc »

walderf wrote: post #29
hammyhavoc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bold of you to assume that I don't want to know that it's real. I asked a question that I thought might lead to some first-hand anecdotal evidence, as I'm intrigued after going through your links that you provided. What's the advantage here to me? What can I do? If what you say is correct and "they" can both read my mind remotely and control my body, organs included, and this is in the public domain with my name atta…

[dead]

What makes you so sure that this is what you claim and not a mental illness? I'm not calling you crazy, I am genuinely intrigued and applying deductive reasoning and rationality to what you've presented to me.

Have you measured it? What was the reading? Can you share your data? Have you tried blocking it?

Why you? Why not someone else? What makes you a person of special interest and deserving of such an extreme measure?

If they have physical control over your body, why did they allow you to tell me this in public?

There's criminals and people on death row they could experiment on and retain complete control over, and yet they pick someone with an internet connection in public.

Despite being able to read your mind, they continue to interfere with you, despite reading about it and posting about it on the internet. Why do they need to read your mind remotely if they can just use the domestic surveillance program? If they're NGO, why not just hack your devices?

What is the statistical likelihood that the person in public who they don't have confined managed to seemingly figure it out?

If this is what you claim, why not just whack you in the first place? It's cheaper and easier, and no risk of a world-changing technology going public and exposing what can be done.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#36

Post by bob_boblaw »

echelon wrote: post #4
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.” This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.

Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them. There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.

isn't that what movies are. an escape from reality. and the good ones get awards and money?

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#37

Post by sycamoretrees »

devsda wrote: post #27

For now the system has to be trained per person. Is the difference in brain activity across individuals significant enough to stop building a universal model? It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.

Why would bilingualism be a defense? Try throwing ChatGPT or whatever a line which combines several languages. e.g., If you ask it “¿Quel est the resultado of 四*6.1, in inglese?”, it will probably reply “4 times 6.1 equals 24.4.” I suppose AI doesn’t think in words, but expects bits of information to be related to X meaning, and from there it can predict a reply and translate that information into words we understand. I haven’t tried the above line, but if it’s not possible already there’s nothing really stopping us from making it work soon enough.

Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#39

Post by anigbrowl »

echelon wrote: post #4
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.” This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.

Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them. There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.

Sounds revolting, fail to see how you could possibly imagine this as a 'good' outcome.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#40

Post by anigbrowl »

echelon wrote: post #19
hammyhavoc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, like get this, when the world is turning to shit because of climate change and we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like. It'll be grand. You'll be hallucinating, I'll be hallucinating, the AI'll be hallucinating too. "His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"

> the world is turning to shit By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive. > because of climate change Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate…

> Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume.

[unpleasant thought]

> This is just vivid imagination.

The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.

Post reply on HN