This AI Reconstructs What You’re Looking at From a Brain Scan

What happened

Previous research has shown they can reveal neural activity linked to what a person is seeing, and scientists have long been interested in using AI to convert these signals into a visual representation of the scene in front of them. Brain scans contain clues about what someone is looking at, but turning those signals back into recognizable images is difficult.

Now, researchers in Israel have built an AI system that recreates what people are looking at with uncanny accuracy. Functional MRI scans, which track blood flow in the brain, are a common tool for decoding what is going on in people’s minds.

So far, this has proved difficult, with early attempts producing blurry images and AI image generators inventing details that bear little resemblance to what the person saw. But now, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science has developed a system called Brain-IT that sets a new bar for accuracy and can be adapted to a new person using just an hour of scan data.