The Sticker That Makes AI See A Toaster
A sticker designed by AI that makes image AI ignore everything else in the photo and see a toaster.
The script
Put this sticker next to a banana... and AI swears it's looking at a toaster.
It's not a picture of a toaster. It's a swirl of colors... designed by another AI.
In twenty seventeen, Google researchers trained it to look as much like a toaster as possible... to a neural network.
But image AI sees edges and patterns, not objects. And this patch is LOUDER than anything else in the photo.
So the banana disappears. Toaster.
And it works printed out, in lots of different scenes.
Which is a problem, when AI is reading the world for us. Because right now, you could...
The facts, checked
- Brown, Mané, Roy, Abadi, Gilmer (Google), "Adversarial Patch", December 2017.
- A printed, universal patch made a classifier label a photo of a banana as a toaster.
- It works in the physical world and across many scenes.
