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This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.
The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.
The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-chil...
What a world.
I can see it now.. The Distractatrons: a new chapter of protagonists in Transformers! The modern equivalent of evil in this day and age of ADHD and low attention span!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
Also: one of the V3A animations reminds me loosely of things I saw when I was a kid, at night, shortly before I slept (though my experience then was more circular).
Or how a very useful tool can become a public health catastrophe.
Also relevant: <https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...>
My understanding is that those who work with the mentally handicapped use bright lights and other stimuli to soothe and control them. It is also my understanding that the autistic are stimulated by vibrant colors (coughcoughMy Little Ponycoughcough).
Who is to say that the rest of us are not also vulnerable to such controlling stimuli?
And I have yet to see a single paper like this where a researcher bails out and publicly says they refuse to work on such projects. Not one.
The most benign interpretation of this observation is that science is filled with spineless opportunists who don’t care who they hurt with what they create. A slightly less benign interpretation might be that many of these people are doing this deliberately, and getting off on the sense of power it gives them.
When it is pushed from the top it is hard to stop at ground level.
Realistically, probably ads, but maybe not only that?
(AI start-up idea: one of our ads a day keeps dementia away! /s)
reason I am asking it could be some relief to our brains after tedious working day, especially after heavy AI usage
if it is targetting visual regions of brain and I have aphantasia (I cannot visualize anything in my mind) is that connected?
But for the paper itself, it seems they're using genetic optimization over predefined keywords. Wonder what would happen if they did gradient descent on the latent space directly. Is brain stimulation just not a good domain for GD?
I don't think it's a matter of if but when. Grim.
[0] https://corticallabs.com/cloud
But here we can start also the usual discussion about technology research for the sake of it vs calibration of possible side effects of new research
Personally i think we haven’t solve this problem and thus it’s just a matter of time until we’ll get in a non-going-back point
Will be interesting to see how strong the controlling forces can be - enough to make you miss things in direct perception like in the book, or only softer effects further up the cognition layer stack
Nothing special compared to purpose made screen savers.
The fact it’s bucketing by making images of lighting and facial expressions, the fact it doesn’t natively do the video it does an image then video generates from it.
The results look really bad and samey. Doubt this would work for the actual thing they’re pitching it for.
Is my brain different or am I just a grumpy millenial hipster?
All of this to say, if you subjected yourself to just enough TikTok scrolling on just the right topic, you might find yourself using it occasionally after that initial hump, then slightly more frequently, then daily.
You might still not "like" it, but the habit is what matters.
Prior exposure to worse feeds gives like an analytical look on the vids rather than emotional. I am fast scanning for the joke. Or something.
I do enjoy watching YouTube videos at home, on the living-room flatscreen, on a variety of topics, but I select them manually, one at a time, from the vast selection The Algorithm(TM) offers me, plus my own searches.