About research claiming to reconstruct images people see from non-invasive brain scans.
Has this happened?
Yes 8 (6%)Not sure 44 (35%)No 74 (59%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About research claiming to reconstruct images people see from non-invasive brain scans.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
They're using ML to map the response from a test stimulus to some interpolated response from 50 training samples, arbitrarily assigning new sample images to these points in space and then passing it off as mind reading.
Could you clarify this? For example, if they trained the model on me visualizing a bear, a fish, and a bird, and then the neural net still outputs "horse" when I visualize a horse, I'd be impressed by this. And if they're going directly to images, I'll be more impressed if they get "black horse" and "brown horse" correctly. That's true even if the idea of reconstructing a specific image is kind of bullshit.
Is this what's happening? Or is their work just turning previously seen inputs into basically identical outputs?