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Researchers Fooled a Google AI Into Thinking a Rifle Was a Helicopter (wired.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Wired report: Algorithms, unlike humans, are susceptible to a specific type of problem called an "adversarial example." These are specially designed optical illusions that fool computers into doing things like mistake a picture of a panda for one of a gibbon. They can be images, sounds, or paragraphs of text. Think of them as hallucinations for algorithms. While a panda-gibbon mix-up may seem low stakes, an adversarial example could thwart the AI system that controls a self-driving car, for instance, causing it to mistake a stop sign for a speed limit one. They've already been used to beat other kinds of algorithms, like spam filters. Those adversarial examples are also much easier to create than was previously understood, according to research released Wednesday from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And not just under controlled conditions; the team reliably fooled Google's Cloud Vision API, a machine learning algorithm used in the real world today. For example, in November another team at MIT (with many of the same researchers) published a study demonstrating how Google's InceptionV3 image classifier could be duped into thinking that a 3-D-printed turtle was a rifle. In fact, researchers could manipulate the AI into thinking the turtle was any object they wanted.

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Humans by temcat · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some can even mistake their wife for a hat!

  2. Re:Google should know already... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The key problem with AI, is its trust in in its sources. They havn't programmed in a silly algorithm yet. When kids are learning to process the world. Kids learn when things are in the wrong context then it is probably silly or just wrong. Even if it from a trusted source, a kid will laugh at their parent if they are saying something that is contradicting their view of the world. Such as when the parent is playing with the kid, they substitute a toy car for a doll, and play with the car like a doll. The child find this amusing because the context is all wrong. The AI algorithm seeing this, would just say this toy probably of usage has expanded to be used as a doll so it must be a doll. There is no questioning saying "no, that is not how you play with that toy". it will take the source as factual and just add it to its list.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.