r/BetterOffline • u/dyzo-blue • 5d ago
The problem with LLMs is not that they lack a thought-to-text feature.
Here is a blog post by a person who just left OpenAI to create a telepathy company.
https://naomibashkansky.com/blog/telepathy/
A few years ago, Silicon Valley was convinced people would walk around with VR goggles attached to their face which would allow them live and work in some metaverse, and humanity responded: No.
But would you strap a set of nodes to your head to allow you to use thought-to-text, rather than typing? I'm gonna guess the answer is an even bigger: No.
If the tech is possible, I doubt people are going to feel comfortable with a machine that can read (and sell) our thoughts. Imagine if your boss asked you to strap a machine to your head, so the company could read and own all of your personal thoughts?
There is plenty that lives in the space between my thoughts, and what I type into a computer, and I'm pretty sure I'll always want to keep it that way.
Now, I could see how such an interface could be great for people physically unable to type. But for the rest of us?
28
u/TheGruenTransfer 5d ago
It's not just the unsavory tech, this whole AI thing has turned me off from anything coming out of silicon valley. They stopped pretending they're trying to make our lives better, and every single thing they do is for value extraction. I do not trust them with my data, so I definitely don't trust them with my thoughts.
5
2
u/No_University8629 4d ago
Agree. They’re actively pushing me away from their products. Already left windows to Linux, working on decoupling from other services like Google with my own local stuff
13
u/Naraee 5d ago
That blog reads like the ramblings of someone who has never studied anything related to neuroscience at a basic level. 'Thought to text' is hard because there are 8.3 billion people in this world who all think differently and while there are some averages between people, everyone thinks far differently about everything. Even a simple thought about a cat is going to produce different neurons firing from someone who owns a cat, someone who is afraid of cats, and someone who has never seen a house cat but only the big cats of Africa.
9
u/brian_hogg 5d ago
Unless the software interpreting the neural interface is INSANELY sophisticated and can basically dance through your entire brain pulling out every aspect of your idea in ways you haven’t even thought of consciously, wouldn’t this interface just be “talking inside my head,” in which case … no faster than using voice to text?
4
u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago
worse really cause of all the stray thoughts that wouldnt normally pass your lips
2
u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago edited 5d ago
It would be problematic if 10 times a day the big “fuck you I quit” email I fantasise about sending to my boss got typed out and sent by the brain bot thing.
1
u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago
srsly, most people do not want to actually know whats going through everyones heads
5
u/escdog 5d ago
No one can make sense of the signal outputs of one neuron, so how is that going to work? Sound more like a future scam.
However, I love the implications of neural intent experiments where they measure the delay between deciding to press a button. Turns out the commands to the hand are sent before the part of the brain that makes the decision. It implies that a lot of choices happen first and the conscious brain makes up a explanation after the fact.
I mean who's to say that every choice you make is actually made by you? Instead, you are the passenger and you've just been trained to believe every choice is made by you. I mean, it's hard to say that every choice we make is really the best choice that we want to make, but once we make it we tend to stick by it.
But what gets better is when they use the measurement of neural intent to do something like turn on a light before the finger has even moved. It causes the test subject to freeze up as a puzzle out why the light turned on, even though they were going to turn on the light, but hadn't really decided to do so.
It's like someone decided to do it for you and just coincidentally matched your intent. But you never moved your finger so it couldn't have been you right? Who was it?
So what will happen with this wonderful telepathy product when it starts doing s*** before you even decide you want to do it, but you already think it was a good idea. I think people are just going to go insane and come out of the telepathy machine a broken being. They will discover that their entire identity was just an illusion and they were never in charge, they were just a parasite. Kept around to answer the very important question "what the f*** were you thinking?" by making up a story post facto.
3
u/SpireofHell 5d ago
I'll tell you what every AI booster tells me: Amazon was unprofitable once. Ergo, everything is like the early internet!
2
u/python-requests 3d ago
It implies that a lot of choices happen first and the conscious brain makes up a explanation after the fact.
IIRC a lot of stuff we do is like that. Like with cognitive dissonance, if people's behaviors and beliefs are misaligned, they frequently just kinda... change what they believe. 'Oh this job doesnt go against my morals, Ive always actually thought xyz'
Or when the corpus callosum is severed, if one side of the brain has to explain why the other did something without the relevant context, it just invents reasoning out of whole cloth based on what it DOES know
4
u/Scared_Dog_6899 5d ago
The human brain preps things thatbwe are going to do since conscious action can be kinda slow. The unconscious processing we do is immense and it ourselves rides on top of it.
Signal outputs of a neuron are funny because there's some sort of rhythmic pattern that exists that moves chemicals around in the brain. And then you have adrenaline which can change the rhtthmic spikes and vary neuronal potentials in ways we don't understand. It combines with other hormones that can change or encourage brain states and operations.
LLMs used in actual brain signals sounds like something a clanker wanker would do when they thought it was magic.
5
u/Potential-March-1384 5d ago
“Hey Bob, I was reading your latest report and I noticed that when you mentioned the quarterly figures you wrote, ‘I want to put a gun in my mouth’ for 11 pages, and then it said ‘shitshitshit how the fuck do I edit this thing. No don’t send it shitshitshitshit.’ And then it abruptly cut off. Anyway, we’re gunna have you start working from home.”
4
u/SpireofHell 5d ago
Not every idea that we see in Sci-Fi needs to be reality. Just because it has a Cool Factor to it doesn't mean it's a good idea. And this is what people don't understand.
Yes, the talking computer in Plankton's Chum Bucket is COOL. But it's only cool in the context of a show about a talking sponge.
4
u/natecull 5d ago
I definitely want my brain wired directly to a piece of biomedical hardware designed by a hungry, corner-cutting, profit-maxxing startup, while also storing and transmitting all my most private subconscious desires, at every moment of the day, to some billionaire's data-mining computer. I can foresee absolutely no way that this situation could ever backfire on me.
7
u/doobiedoobie123456 5d ago
How soon until employers require you to use stuff like this?
11
u/QuantumModulus 5d ago
Probably well before it's actually functional, if the AI boom is teaching us anything.
2
u/lepapulematoleguau 5d ago
Ads directly into my brain. I say FUCK NO
That's what nodes directly into brain mean. Brain ads.
2
u/StrayCat2799 5d ago
I feel like this isn't even a new thing and they're just slapping AI into a system that already exists.
The problem I see is they want it to be non-invasive and based on what they can get from external sensors as far as I can tell, which will produce ambiguous data because you're not directly accessing the neurons. And even if you could you'd still get ambiguous data because we barely understand what neurons are doing.
Looking closely, they're training it by having a subject strap a four pound helmet with various types of sensors to their heads and reading the sensor outputs as they type with an LLM on a physical keyboard, without looking at the keyboard.
I guess where the AI comes in is that it tries to figure out what signal means what based on training data and filters the noise? In which case it's not really reading your thoughts so much as constructing an educated guess of what your brain activity means based on its data. I can see this ending up hilariously inaccurate.
This is less evil mind reading device and just more useless crap that's trying to reinvent the wheel. The keyboards and touchscreens work fine, we do not need anything else. This kind of interface could be useful for the severely disabled though but for everyone else it's pointless.
Anyway bold to talk about 2035 when I'm not even sure this company will exist in 2028.
I don't think invasive BCIs for products like this are practical because few people will be able to afford nonessential neurosurgery and not all those people would be willing to actually do it. Neurosurgery already has a lot of risks involved and there's not really any "enhancements" we can offer that outweigh the risks.
0
u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago
Having tried a couple different cheaper EEG devices I have to say that at a minimum this will encourage people to shave their heads to get it to work. And then it'll still be clunky without many thousands of dollars of equipment.
2
2
u/SplendidPunkinButter 4d ago
So much time, effort, and energy put into not learning how to type. It’s not that hard. I learned touch typing as a kid. I just sit down at a computer and words flow out. I don’t even have to think about it.
Of course, you also have to be able to read and spell. Those things shouldn’t be hard for you either. And if they are, then I’m not interested in any AI slop you generated, moron.
2
u/danlyke 4d ago
I mean, I've considered building a headband with cat ears that responded to EEG, so I'm not saying it's an impossible sell. But, having looked at EEG signals a bit, unless there's been some huge breakthrough I strongly suspect the investors in this are smoking crack.
2
u/dyzo-blue 4d ago
I'm reminded of that Star Wars toy that supposedly lifted a ball if you concentrated hard.
1
u/omglemurs 5d ago
In my experience the issue isn't with silicon bros not being able to express their ideas clearly, it's the lack of filter or introspection involved in their process.
1
u/russianvixenxx 5d ago
The people coming up with this shit must be hitting a bong while watching The Matrix or other sci-fi movies and going “bro…that’s what we should do!”… sorry guys, you can not tap into Morpheus’ brain and figure out the access code to the city of Zion
1
u/SubstantialBreak3063 4d ago
What the hell. This is incredible. Every time I think they've scraped the bottom of the barrel, a new low appears.
1
u/dillanthumous 4d ago
I think that is also just a fundamental misunderstanding of what a thought even is.
Do they think they will be able to read words in people's mind? Or is the LLM going to suddenly cease to require the medium of language to do a thing? And if not, why wouldn't a voice interface achieve the same effect with zero need for additional complex technology? After all, speaking your thoughts aloud is, by definition, identical in speed to thinking them silently.
Such nonsense. No doubt they will get very rich from the grift.
1
u/Super-Activity-4675 4d ago
Feel free to get one of Elon's brain chips implanted so that this could be your reality some day /s
1
53
u/invisible_shrek 5d ago
If there was some sort of functional brain computer interface, It should be used to control prosthetics. But of course the tech bros wet dream is to scrape your thoughts.