Mindreading enables us to predict other people’s behaviour and facilitates appropriate action, including mindshaping, i.e., influencing other people’s minds to make them think or act in certain ways, e.g., exercised by politicians. Many higher animals like chimps and jays are also believed to engage in mindreading since, like humans, they lack the computational powers to track complex behaviours but consider the perspective and presence of others in doing what they do, e.g., food caching.

We suggest a form of pervasive mindreading that involves artificial intelligence, in particular, machine (or deep) learning technology. Hence, the label deep mindreading. Big tech companies like Meta, X, Google, and others, can draw on a wealth of personal data from individuals and make use of machine learning systems to detect patterns in their behaviours. These person profiles allow them to make accurate predictions about how and when people will vote, think, click, buy, act, and so on, based on what they believe, desire, and prefer, to engage in mindshaping (e.g., personalized advertising). In contrast to humans and animals, AI has the computational power to track behaviours to engage in mindreading and mindshaping. This privacy invasion raises ethical concerns.