Computers can guess what you're seeing

In previous posts, we've seen how artificial-intelligence systems can generate captions for images, and can even create a photo-real image from a written description.

A deep-learning algorithm can tell what you're looking at by scanning your brain. Photo CNN

Now, scientists in Japan report that the same kind of technology can guess what you're looking at from your brain activity alone. The process uses fMRI brain technology, which scans blood flow in the brain in real time.

After a period of training, the system generates a short natural-language caption based on what it supposes you're looking at. Sometimes the captions are right on. For example when a person was looking at the photo to the left, the computer correctly hypothesized that the image showed: A man is playing tennis on the court with his racket.

When the guess was a little wrong, it was wrong in an interesting way. Once, when the subject being scanned was looking at a man kayaking on a river, it concluded: A man is surfing in the ocean on his surf board.

Right now the technology is limited by practical issues (the subject has to lie down in a big expensive machine). However, it could become part of an efficient brain-computer interface (BCI), which requires close two-way communication between the user and the machine. 

It also portends a variety of creep-factor sci-fi implications. For example, conceivably authority figures would be able to monitor "thought crimes" based on what's going on in your brain.
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Scientific article: Describing Semantic Representations of Brain Activity Evoked by Visual Stimuli
Popular article on Futurism: What Are YOU Looking At? Mind-Reading AI Knows
Previously:
Text to Image Synthesis
Computers are Learning to Caption Photos
Style Transfer by Deep Learning