Engineers in Belgium have demonstrated how simple printed patterns can trick an artificial intelligence system that has been designed to see people in images.
(Adversarial Patches Trick Computer Vision)
If you print off one of the students’ specially designed patches and hang it around your neck, from an AI’s point of view, you may as well have slipped under an invisibility cloak.
As the researchers write: “We believe that, if we combine this technique with a sophisticated clothing simulation, we can design a T-shirt print that can make a person virtually invisible for automatic surveillance cameras.”
In his 2010 book Zero History, science fiction author William Gibson describes a special kind of t-shirt that can fool surveillance cameras:
"...The surveillance cameras can all see it, but then they forget they’ve seen it.”
“Why?”
“Because their architecture tells them to forget it, and anyone who’s wearing it as well. They forget the figure wearing the ugly T-shirt. Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure. That which the camera sees, bearing the sigil, it deletes from the recalled image. Though only if you ask it to show you the image. So there’s no suspicious busy-ness to be noticed. If you ask for June 7, camera 53, it retrieves what it saw. In the act of retrieval, the sigil, and the human form bearing it, cease to be represented.
(Read more about William Gibson's ugly t-shirt)
A System To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.' - Neal Stephenson, 2019.
Smart TVs Are Listening!
'You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard...' - George Orwell, 1948.
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A System To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'