By: Nour Hany
A new technological development has been released by a group of researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland, allowing computers to read people's minds to generate images.
Thirty-one individuals volunteered to participate in the experiment in which they were shown hundreds of Artificial-Intelligence (AI) generated images portraying different people quickly. The volunteers were then asked to concentrate on particular features, such as old or smiling faces; the brain activity of the participants was recorded via an electroencephalogram (EEG) and fed into a neural network. The network showed whether or not the images detected by the brain matched what the subjects were looking at; it was later able to indicate what kinds of faces were in the participants' thoughts.
When the researchers asked the participants to evaluate the generated images and how well they matched the facial features they were thinking of, they rated it as 83% matching. The developed technology is likely to be used to enhance human creativity in the future. If you want to draw or illustrate any kind of image that you are thinking of, you will be able to produce your art with the help of this technology.
Researchers also believe that this technology could open the path for more profound understanding of perception and other fundamental mental processes. The technique responds to our association with mental categories, but it does not recognize thoughts or indicate the identity of a particular old person that the participant was thinking of. It may also introduce a new method to gain insight into cognitive, emotional, and social processes, as it helps in understanding what the participants associate with old age.
Such technological development is a significant achievement in the scientific community; it could lead to underlying achievements towards understanding the human mind.
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