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AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

nevo-project.epfl.ch

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Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#121

Post by akramachamarei »

ajb wrote: post #103

An anecdote, but some reason to think that overworking part of your brain is a bad idea: I had an Aunt who had dementia. This is obviously a terrible outlook. But her and my Uncle seemed to be doing okay. My Uncle was an ultra-competent guy, highly stable, the person you could rely on; and had been his whole adult life. So it was shocking when he had a mental breakdown and became manic. There was probably something p…

> I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled.

What's to gain in doing so?

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#122

Post by bcjdjsndon »

qsera wrote: post #61
zx8080 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads efficacy, of course.

Advertisements actually run the world. Imagine a world without ads. The economy would grind to a halt. It is exploitation and manipulation, but that enables creation of large capital, which leads to great things. In the past it was pyramids and temples, and in modern times it is space exploration, scientific research and other things that require huge capital. Even the current advances in AI/LLMs are made possible by…

> which leads to great things

Slavery (or getting poorer people to do the work for you) is the central concept of civilization. It cannot be done without it. It's not capital or advertising that makes all this work, it's forcing the poor to work and pay tax that makes the world go round d

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#123

Post by alexpotato »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #117
alexpotato wrote: post #106

What's interesting is that the process of identifying what gets human attention is nothing new. e.g. cartoons from the 1950s were designed to have: - cute animals - short and fast scene cuts - catchy music b/c all three of the above were known to trick the human brain into "sit still and observe" mode. Focus groups did the same thing for advertising which then morphed into A/B testing to determine revealed preference…

Books are designed to be addictive. People said the same things about books as they say about screens nowadays. I think it's more important to understand the emotional hysteria people get themselves into

My favorite addiction epidemic was when apparently the "catch the ball on the string in the cup" took over parts of Europe to the point that people were ignoring their work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#125

Post by fcarraldo »

anon373839 wrote: post #89
aubanel wrote: post #78

This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…

Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts. We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time. * I…

The largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts.

Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#126

Post by Ntrails »

aubanel wrote: post #78

This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…

> Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.

You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#127

Post by jrmg »

I’ll leave it to other comments to discuss the societal and moral implications of being able to do this (which, I agree, ick…). On a practical level:

We train an encoding model, a “digital twin”, that predicts how each visual region responds to any video. Now we can ask: which video would make a chosen region light up the most? NEvo searches for that video automatically, using the twin’s prediction as its reward.

I only scanned the paper, so maybe I missed it, but is there any confirmation that this ‘digital twin’ works? Like, do the generated videos actually cause the same patterns as in the ‘digital twin’ brain model in real humans in an MRI machine? My instinct is to be skeptical that it’s possible to reliably create a video -> brain activation prediction model.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#128

Post by actionfromafar »

anon373839 wrote: post #89
aubanel wrote: post #78

This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…

Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts. We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time. * I…

Social media is also AI now, so I don't really see the difference.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#130

Post by tikimcfee »

akramachamarei wrote: post #121
ajb wrote: post #103

An anecdote, but some reason to think that overworking part of your brain is a bad idea: I had an Aunt who had dementia. This is obviously a terrible outlook. But her and my Uncle seemed to be doing okay. My Uncle was an ultra-competent guy, highly stable, the person you could rely on; and had been his whole adult life. So it was shocking when he had a mental breakdown and became manic. There was probably something p…

> I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled. What's to gain in doing so?

I will state plainly that I do not think you are asking this maliciously, and that instead you are asking from curiosity. From that perspective, though, I am a bit flabbergasted.

Are you truly curious as to how it might not be A Good Thing that those engaging in high-finance capitalistic money making programs would have access to forcefully engaging a human being's brain into activity, with or without their consent, to such an extent as to drive motivations and bias neuronal activation that leads to what they think is a choice?

Said another way: Are you really curious as to how allowing a company additional tools to bias human interactions may not be A Good Thing?

If you need an example as to how this is clearly not A Good Thing, and that at least a portion of the world population agrees with that characteristic, that there are currently companies that have tried to actively do this already, and attempts are being made at least to fine them for their behavior as an attempt to curb it. Whether or not it succeeds is a question of governance at the moment since the US is currently under plutocratic control.

However, I would really urge you to explore this topic and really engage with what's happening due to the plutocratic class' capabilities over technologic change and societally enforced or biased adoption, and how they, in many extreme cases that are continuing to become more extreme, are not A Good Thing.

Simplest, most readily available example: https://ground.news/article/meta-says-us-states-are-seeking-...

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