These psychedelic stickers blow AI minds via Techcrunch

Machine learning systems are very capable, but they aren’t exactly smart. They lack common sense. Taking advantage of that fact, researchers have created a wonderful attack on image recognition systems that uses specially printed stickers that are so interesting to the AI that it completely fails to see anything else. Why do I get the feeling these may soon be popular accessories?

Computer vision is an incredibly complex problem, and it’s only by cognitive shortcuts that even humans can see properly — so it shouldn’t be surprising that computers need to do the same thing.

One of the shortcuts these systems take is not assigning every pixel the same importance. Say there’s a picture of a house with a bit of sky behind it and a little grass in front. A few basic rules make it clear to the computer that this is not a picture “of” the sky or the grass, despite their presence. So it considers those background and spends more cycles analyzing the shape in the middle.

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