Tag Archives: thoughts

Nonverbal Neuralink Patient Is Using Brain Implant and Grok to Generate Replies

Posted on by

The third patient of Elon Musk's brain computer interface company Neuralink is using Musk's AI chatbot Grok to speed up communication.

The third patient of Elon Musk's brain computer interface company Neuralink is using the billionaire's foul-mouthed AI chatbot Grok to speed up communication.

The patient, Bradford Smith, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is nonverbal as a result, is using the chatbot to draft responses on Musk's social media platform X.

"I am typing this with my brain," Smith tweeted late last month. "It is my primary communication. Ask me anything! I will answer at least all verified users!"

"Thank you, Elon Musk!" the tweet reads.

As MIT Technology Review points out, the strategy could come with some downsides, blurring the line between what Smith intends to say and what Grok suggests. On one hand, the tech could greatly facilitate his ability to express himself. On the other hand, generative AI could be robbing him of a degree of authenticity by putting words in his mouth.

"There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy," University of Washington neurologist Eran Klein told the publication. "The promise of brain-computer interface is that if you can combine it with AI, it can be much faster."

Case in point, while replying to X user Adrian Dittmann — long suspected to be a Musk sock puppet — Smith used several em-dashes in his reply, a symbol frequently used by AI chatbots.

"Hey Adrian, it’s Brad — typing this straight from my brain! It feels wild, like I’m a cyborg from a sci-fi movie, moving a cursor just by thinking about it," Smith's tweet reads. "At first, it was a struggle — my cursor acted like a drunk mouse, barely hitting targets, but after weeks of training with imagined hand and jaw movements, it clicked, almost like riding a bike."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, generative AI did indeed play a role.

"I asked Grok to use that text to give full answers to the questions," Smith told MIT Tech. "I am responsible for the content, but I used AI to draft."

However, he stopped short of elaborating on the ethical quandary of having a potentially hallucinating AI chatbot put words in his mouth.

Murkying matters even further is Musk's position as being in control of Neuralink, Grok maker xAI, and X-formerly-Twitter. In other words, could the billionaire be influencing Smith's answers? The fact that Smith is nonverbal makes it a difficult line to draw.

Nonetheless, the small chip implanted in Smith's head has given him an immense sense of personal freedom. Smith has even picked up sharing content on YouTube. He has uploaded videos he edits on his MacBook Pro by controlling the cursor with his thoughts.

"I am making this video using the brain computer interface to control the mouse on my MacBook Pro," his AI-generated and astonishingly natural-sounding voice said in a video titled "Elon Musk makes ALS TALK AGAIN," uploaded late last month. "This is the first video edited with the Neurolink and maybe the first edited with a BCI."

"This is my old voice narrating this video cloned by AI from recordings before I lost my voice," he added.

The "voice clone" was created with the help of startup ElevenLabs, which has become an industry standard for those suffering from ALS, and can read out his written words aloud.

But by relying on tools like Grok and OpenAI's ChatGPT, Smith's ability to speak again raises some fascinating questions about true authorship and freedom of self-expression for those who lost their voice.

And Smith was willing to admit that sometimes, the ideas of what to say didn't come directly from him.

"My friend asked me for ideas for his girlfriend who loves horses," he told MIT Tech. "I chose the option that told him in my voice to get her a bouquet of carrots. What a creative and funny idea."

More on Neuralink: Brain Implant Companies Apparently Have an Extremely Dirty Secret

The post Nonverbal Neuralink Patient Is Using Brain Implant and Grok to Generate Replies appeared first on Futurism.

The rest is here:
Nonverbal Neuralink Patient Is Using Brain Implant and Grok to Generate Replies

Groundbreaking Brain Chip Allows Man With ALS to "Speak" Again

Posted on by

Using an amazing new brain chip, a man who'd lost the ability to speak is now able to communicate his thoughts out loud using his own voice.

Using an amazing new brain-computer interface (BCI), a man who'd lost the ability to speak is now able to communicate his thoughts out loud using his own voice.

Scientists at the University of California, Davis have developed a brain chip that can interpret brain signals and have them be "read" aloud by a computer in real time.

Using this chip, 45-year-old Casey Harrell, whose speech is slurred from the muscle control loss that characterizes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease, went from being very difficult to understand to communicating in a computerized voice.

What's more: the voice assistant software connected to Harrell's BCI is designed to sound like his voice before the disease took hold using artificial intelligence trained with audio samples of him pre-ALS.

Implanted last summer in the left precentral gyrus, the brain region responsible for speech, the BCI's 256 electrodes record the area's activity and essentially convert it into text that's then read aloud by the AI voice assistant mere seconds later.

As UC Davis neuroprosthesis expert Sergey Stavisky explained in a press release, the chip does so by "translating those patterns of brain activity into a phoneme — like a syllable or the unit of speech — and then the words they’re trying to say."

Though it's far from the first device that helps people with diseases like ALS to communicate — Stephen Hawking famously used a specialized microprocessing computer powered by Intel to talk after losing the ability to speak following an emergency tracheotomy in 1985 — Davis scientists say their BCI functions even better because its translation algorithm was built with natural speech flow in mind.

"Previous speech BCI systems had frequent word errors," explained UC Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, the principal investigator in the experiment and the co-senior author of the study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This made it difficult for the user to be understood consistently and was a barrier to communication."

"Our objective," Brandman continued, "was to develop a system that empowered someone to be understood whenever they wanted to speak."

It's not the only brain chip that has helped an ALS patient regain their ability to communicate. Last year, for instance, a 36-year-old German man, who was fully paralyzed by the condition, had a BCI implanted — and immediately asked for a beer when it allowed him to spell out messages.

More on brain chips: Brain Implant Hooked Up to Control VR Headset

The post Groundbreaking Brain Chip Allows Man With ALS to "Speak" Again appeared first on Futurism.

Read the rest here:
Groundbreaking Brain Chip Allows Man With ALS to "Speak" Again