‘Mind-captioning’ AI decodes brain activity to turn thoughts into text

A technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using scans of their brain activity. It is based on artificial intelligence models trained on the text captions of thousands of videos, and brain scans of people watching them. The technique could help those with language difficulties to communicate better, says computational neuroscientist Alex Huth. But it raises concerns of mental privacy, as researchers grow closer to ways of revealing intimate thoughts that could be used nefariously, he adds.