You can already type and speak to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but what if they could read your mind, too?
New research points to a future when generative artificial intelligence could help you brainstorm by plucking thoughts straight from your head.
In a recent study published in the journal Nature, experts from Google and Japan’s Osaka University say they have developed an AI model that can reconstruct music from brain scans.
As part of the experiment, participants listened to 540 music samples from 10 different genres as researchers measured their brain activity using fMRI scans.
These intricate neural patterns were used to train an advanced deep neural network that matched the changes in brain activity with musical characteristics such as mood, genre, and instrumentation.
For the final part of the experiment, the researchers deployed an experimental tool from Google that turns written prompts into music. The AI, known as MusicLM, used the data to reconstruct the music participants listened to.
According to researchers, the generated music resembled audio that the human subjects listened to with respect to elements such as genre, instrumentation, and mood.
Google shared several audio examples from the study, including clips of recreated hits such as Beastie Boys’ Fight for Your Right and Britney Spears’ Oops!... I Did It Again.
The AI-produced simulacrums emulate the rock and pop beats of the originals, but the vocals are indiscernible. Still, the authors believe the early signs are promising for the embryonic technology.
In its current form, the AI model could help to create a crude recreation of the music in your head.
But, as we’ve seen with other generative AI, these tools can evolve fast. ChatGPT started off responding to text prompts and quickly jumped to images and video. While AI image generators such as Midjourney are producing more convincing results with each update.
Discussing what the future holds for their AI model, the researchers said: ”An exciting next step is to attempt the reconstruction of music or musical attributes from a subject’s imagination... This would qualify for an actual ‘mind-reading’ label.”
The development of the new tech raises the question of what the future of music might look like.
Could we one day see a world where people can control AI-powered electronic instruments with their thoughts? Or where AI-generated songs are indistinguishable from human-made tracks?
Artificial intelligence has already had an outsized impact on music. Even before the recent boom in fake AI songs made by tinkerers in their bedrooms, producers and artists were using the tech to remove vocals from beats and create album artwork.
Several years before it gave the world ChatGPT, research lab OpenAI released a pair of music-making AI tools called MuseNet and Jukebox that could create songs in the style of different artists.
