this is generating a lot of discussion and we wanted to clear a few things up. first, we take privacy very seriously and reject the use of brain decoders for surveillance, interrogation, and other unethical applications
very excited to share our paper on reconstructing language from non-invasive brain recordings! we introduce a decoder that takes in fMRI recordings and generates continuous language descriptions of perceived speech, imagined speech, and possibly much more biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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@AmandaLeBel3 posted a great thread about the privacy sections in our paper, and i'd like to further unpack some of those ideas (2/9)
I am sure most of you have seen @jerryptang 's thread on our new paper on non-invasive brain decoding. It's clear that this a big development and could be useful for many people. But I wanted to highlight what my favorite thing in this paper is!
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we were relieved to find that there doesn't seem to be a way around that - it's unlikely that we could train our decoder without someone's full cooperation. of course this can change as technology improves, which motivated us to look at resistance strategies (4/9)
Oct 2, 2022 · 1:19 AM UTC
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decoding performance fell to unintelligble levels when subjects performed simple mental tasks while staying still. motion should further lower performance. this could also change, so we are staying vigilant and working to test other resistance tasks (5/9)
finally, we tested whether our decoder respects user privacy, and found that subject cooperation is currently required to train and to run the decoder. for instance, we developed a set of covert resistance strategies that substantially lowered decoding performance (6/7)
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our biggest concern is that malevolent entities can intentionally misinterpret decoder results - this doesn't even require an accurate decoder. we believe that it is critical to enact policies that protect mental privacy in the face of such violations (6/9)
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to this end, we wanted to be very clear about what our decoder can and cannot do (see our supplementary tables for full transcripts), and we believe that transparency and awareness provide the best way forward (7/9)
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finally, some have asked about the positive uses of brain decoding. our initial goal was to restore speech to people with locked-in syndrome. since then, intracranial decoders have gotten very good at speech restoration, and we didn't want to draw attention away from that (8/9)
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