Trevor Paglen on AI mind-reading and the erosion of inner privacy

Artist Trevor Paglen recounts a two-day fMRI experiment at Cornell University where an AI system, NeuroGen, predicted his brain responses and generated images to elicit specific activity, leaving him feeling his mind had been read. He traces the field from Jack Gallant's 2011 blurry video reconstruction to Alex Huth's LLM-based text decoding of brain activity, and notes Meta paid $500 million to $1 billion for a wristband startup that translates brain signals into computer commands. Rafael Yuste, who made mice see phantom images with lasers, co-founded the Neurorights Foundation to build legal guardrails around brain data.