Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

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It is not in the same species, these systems have to be trained on every individual brain, they are not reading some objective signal that is the same for everyone.

> For weeks, Ann worked with the team to train the system’s artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize her unique brain signals for speech. This involved repeating different phrases from a 1,024-word conversational vocabulary over and over again until the computer recognized the brain activity patterns associated with all the basic sounds of speech.

To use this type of system for lie detection, if such a thing is possible, you'd have to get each subject to give you thousands of example statements with truth/lie labels. This obviously defeats the purpose, and also doesn't really seem possible - does lying for a training exercise produce the same brain patterns as lying to actually cover something up? Probably not.

Your objections are that training is required and that where and how the lie is uttered might bear.

Mere technical hurdles IMO.

I would presume that someone being subject to a lie detector may have different incentives than those running the lie detector, and they may intentionally taint the data.

I think the point is, who would deliberately train a system to detect their own lies?

> who would deliberately train a system to detect their own lies?

Maybe an employee required to do so as part of on-boarding to a corporation or government org?

Or maybe someone in the process of a passport or visa application?

This podcast episode [0] with Sean Carroll and Nita Farahany scared the crap out of me on this topic, it seems inevitable.

This is the time to regulate neuro access prior to it becoming big business, and part of the TSA screening process.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...

I was thinking it might be something everybody does in highschool or something. Every morning you spend an hour training your AI shadow. Everybody gets one. So useful, like a cell phone.

It still seems trivial to game. Make up some "tell" for your lies. Maybe every time you need to lie during the training period you squeeze your muscles, or think of hard math problems. It would be very hard for the AI not to fit to this fake "tell."

Those sound like techniques to fool a polygraph.

There are new infrared sensors in development that should see much more complex behavior in the brain, than say EEG. I’m sure even those could be gamed theoretically, but it will clearly become increasingly difficult as the technology improves.

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