Second row: images reconstructed by AI based on brain recordings from a macaque. Artificial intelligence systems can now create remarkably accurate reconstructions of what someone is looking at based on recordings of their brain activity. These reconstructed images are greatly improved when the AI learns which parts of the brain to pay attention to. "As far as I know, these are the closest, most accurate reconstructions," says Umut Güçlü at Radboud University in the Netherlands. How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won't) Güçlü's team is one of several around the world using AI systems to work out what animals or people are seeing from brain recordings and scans. In one previous study, his team used a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner to record the brain activity of three people as they were shown a series of photographs.

News headlines might not be the only things that are fake in the future. Powerful machine-learning techniques (see "The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI") are making it increasingly easy to manipulate or generate realistic video and audio, and to impersonate anyone you want with amazing accuracy. A smartphone app called FaceApp, released recently by a company based in Russia, can automatically modify someone's face to add a smile, add or subtract years, or swap genders. The app can also apply "beautifying" effects that include smoothing out wrinkles and, more controversially, lightening the skin. And last week a company called Lyrebird, which was spun out of the University of Montreal, demonstrated technology that it says can be used to impersonate another person's voice.