From deep-fakes that embody political figures like puppet-masters to the promise of AI predicting art market trends, contemporary culture is outsourcing more and more of its imaginative labor to artificial decision-making. While scientists might seem far from reading minds, algorithms are already creating much of our visual stimuli, littering the virtual sphere with dots and semi-circles we recognize as human. XDREAM methodically altered the colors, shapes, and textures, studiously attending to Ringo's unconscious desires.

As he sipped his juice, Ringo faced a flickering onslaught of strange visual forms. At their disposal are nascent neural networks, artificial intelligence technologies trained on vast, often dubious data sets like ImageNet eager to excite each neuron and trigger its particular whim. Now scientists are beginning to reach behind the veil, to see if they can understand how the imagination functions, which neurons are primed for which stimuli, who is dreaming about what. Mind's eye has long been another mystery of human consciousness, a domain of religious imagination, philosophical musing, and personal experience. 4 The images certainly evoke a dream– in all their uncanny, startling strangeness. ''If cells are dreaming, are what the cells are dreaming about'' says neuroscientist Carlos Ponce, one of the researchers. Out of the glitch emerged semi-human, semi-primate eyes above a white face mask, eyes reminiscent to those of Ringo's caretaker Diane (and the very researchers in the room). 3 The images started out as soft, grey abstractions, but soon took shape as the algorithm altered the image in response to higher neural activity in the facial recognition centers of Ringo's brain. 2 After schooling XDREAM on over a million images from the standard training database ImageNet, the deep generative neural network was fed inputs from a genetic algorithm which monitored the stimuli of specific neurons in Ringo's brain. Researchers in a lab at Harvard Medical School saw a startling yet familiar image emerge across their monitors when they hooked up their artificial intelligence XDREAM to a monkey named Ringo. From patterns in wood grain, to craters on the moon, humans often succumb to their pareidoliac urge to see their face reflected in the world.

Xdream neural network