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How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout
- bsenftner 8y agoMy god this little info blurb is getting printed, regurgitated everywhere. This article is the 14th one I've seen about this specific project.
- tempodox 8y agoIsn't it just ludicrous, using the term “AI” for a piece of technology that can't even see straight, let alone “think”.
- gtirloni 8y agoI think the saying goes like this: if it works it's just machine learning, if it fails it's AI.
- Ftuuky 8y agoMachine learning is usually written in Python, AI is written in PowerPoint.
- ansgri 8y agoThen what's get written in C++?
- whenchamenia 8y agoPython was written in C. :)
- valine 8y agoMost of the things people call AI isn't actually AI. Buzz words just help with funding, and at the same time the projects are undoubtedly useful so everyone just goes with it. News sites get more clicks and ad revenue for writing articles on AI, researchers get funding, and the world gets better image classifiers.
- blantonl 8y agoExactly. Just look at IBM Watson. That project started as some machine learning technology until the huge enterprise marketing arm got ahold of it, and then they began repositioning what are essentially shell scripts and regular expressions parsing data into "Watson XXX Vertical AI"
- wool_gather 8y agoThere's another way of looking at it. Given that we accept a spectrum of intelligence in biological forms -- i.e., a spider is not as intelligent as a sheep is not as intelligent as a crow is not as intelligent as a human -- why wouldn't we also have a spectrum for A.I.?
- stOneskull 8y agoyou are right. there should be.
- pjc50 8y agoHumans and some animals are also vulnerable to optical illusions. The unusual thing about this category of "AI optical illusion" is that it's nonlocal - having the patch in the frame defeats recognition of other objects.
- wongarsu 8y agoAlso while humans experience many optical illusions we are quite good at using temporal information and knowledge about how objects behave. We often flag our own observations as implausible and try to get a view from a different angle to defeat the illusion. Most AI can't do that, simply because it has no possibility to get a second perspective on the same situation.
- dchichkov 8y agoQuite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&feature=youtu.be
- Nasrudith 8y agoAI is a much abused term but there are unresolved practically philosophical questions about the brain. If there is no "special sauce" and our brains are just very large neural networks that have what we see as intelligence is an emergent property would we be truly "thinking" by those standards? We also suffer from adversarial patterns - they are called camouflage and optical illusions. Different from the ones that affect machines of course.
- driverdan 8y agoI hate the abuse of the term AI too. It's not AI. AI doesn't exist yet. It's machine learning.
- DannyB2 8y agoHere is a good video showing the same two guys passing the card back and forth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbFvK2S9g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbFvK2S9g8 If a security camera uses this YOLO to identify people moving into the frame, then this important new development can help prevent security camera systems from making annoying sounds that would disturb the sleep of security guards.
- rtkwe 8y agoFigure 7 in the paper [0] shows something really important. The learned adversarial patch is not general at all and has to be held in a specific place with a specific orientation to function. This means it's not going to be generalizable to actual surveillance where you'll be viewed from a lot of different potential angles or say onto a shirt or jacket you can just wear. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08653.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08653.pdf
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y agoWell, I guess that that would be the next step. Another problem is that the minute that AI-proof clothing goes mass market is the minute it stops working (and for that reason, I suppose that you wouldn't want to have a product image, either.)
- rtkwe 8y agoI'm not 100% sure a static image on cloth will ever work well for that kind of general countermeasure. So far all adversarial stuff except the dazzle camouflage face paint require pretty precise position or view relative to the object being labeled.
- NotPaidToPost 8y agoThe minute clothing that is really effective against AI video surveillance is available when AI video surveillance is widespread is the minute it will become a criminal offence to sell or wear such clothing...
- erikpukinskis 8y agoHere's a better question: Will the book, "How To Make AI-proof Clothing" stop working the minute it is published, or will it teach generalizable skills. It would seem unfair to pit a static object (prefab clothes) against a dynamic opponent (person detection AI). Better to compare two intelligent opponents.
- mkagenius 8y ago> AI-proof clothing goes mass market is the minute it stops working What prevents GAN's from learning a new patch for them ?
- patrickg_zill 8y agoSo basically if you printed a strange design on one of those T-shirts that can be printed on all over, you could fool the AI in most cases... the same way that "Dazzle" camouflage for ships, works... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
- brad0 8y agoUnfortunately no. As soon as the image is rotated slightly to one side it disables the adversary print out. You can see this in the original paper with the final image. Now, that doesn’t mean that a camouflage couldn’t be created that more generally avoids detection from these algorithms.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ohaideredevs 8y agoThis will get fixed quickly. Gimmick.
- pelario 8y agoImpossible not to think in "A scanner Darkly" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqWBCsWRdw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqWBCsWRdw4
- wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 8y agoCame here to say this.
- d--b 8y agoIs anyone starting a clothing brand?
- olivermarks 8y agoThere was a trend in San Francisco (and probably elsewhere) about 10 years ago for clothing with really complicated and brightly colored small repeating designs on, almost like kindergarden childrenswear. You'd see sketchy looking people in the tenderloin and market street wearing them. I asked a lawyer about it and apparently it made identification in court cases harder, because you could argue over whether the colorful hoodie the accused was wearing had aircraft or birds on it, and were they green or blue etc while seen at the crime scene by witnesses.
- driverdan 8y agoThat's why white T-shirts were popular among street dealers. If everyone wears the same common thing then it makes it harder to identify perps.
- ed312 8y agoI haven't found one yet, but I'm seriously considering doing this as a side project.
- amiune 8y agoSomething like this? https://us.loudmouthgolf.com/index.php/men/apparel/pants/bakers-dozen-stretchtech-men-s-pant.html https://us.loudmouthgolf.com/index.php/men/apparel/pants/bak...
- ackbar03 8y agoI refuse to identify the wearer as human as well. I'm not a robot I just did a captcha to check
- injidup 8y agoWhat is faster to patch, a patch you buy from patchemeout.com to wear on your t-shirt or a patchable person detection system updated with patches in realtime as adverserial patches are detected being worn by patched people?
- tapland 8y agoPrinting it on a color printer? Real-time LCD display?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DarmokJalad1701 8y agoOf course the surveillance state is using YoloV2 for all their tracking needs ...
- phito 8y agoYou'd be surprised how many surveillance companies that offers object detection use it behind the scenes
- lordnacho 8y agoIs it not a little surprising that the patch just has to be roughly where the person's belly is? You'd think the NN identifies people by finding a face and maybe limbs. Or a head-and-shoulders. But maybe it doesn't. What would happen to a gorilla wearing the patch?
- phito 8y agoThe neural network isn't looking for a head, limbs etc... It's just looking for overall patterns. The soft used in the article is Yolo and I work a lot with it, and the results depends A LOT on the data you used for training. Some datasets will detect a gorilla as an human, some won't. Some even will detect two upside down fingers as a human. So if you want your NN to not detect gorillas as a human, you have to include pictures containing gorillas where they are not labelled as humans.
- RugnirViking 8y agoIt makes a certain sort of sense - if a person's torso isn't connected to their legs, it's not very person shaped, is it. I'd agree it's surprising, just that thinking about it you can see where it goes wrong. I imagine combining this with some kind of makeup to change the contours of one's face would work wonders.
- lordnacho 8y ago> if a person's torso isn't connected to their legs, it's not very person shaped, is it. I suppose it really depends on the training set. In some sense the set can be misleading. For instance if I have a load of pictures of people sitting by a table with their legs visible, that model might actually require a gap between your torso and your legs.
- RugnirViking 8y agoThat's true. In fact in the video, the man's lower legs are obscured by the chair and this poses little problem for the system. However, I would say that if this was all that were required, they would have used a blank square. Instead, they provide cues that mess with the system's sense of scale, by having almost like a window into another, smaller scene, with vague, human-like images that the network presumably recognises as faces. A group of tiny faces on the top of a single set of legs very much does not look like a human.
- vesinisa 8y agoComing up: AI technology that can identify people who try to hide from AI surveillance state with a color printout
- Scoundreller 8y agoI want a vehicle wrap with license plate-looking characters.
- sodosopa 8y agoAI derived printed textiles with randomized color blocks. Use AI against AI. If your clothing looks like it's glitched out, is that the video or is it a new form of personal camouflage?
- leecarraher 8y agoBy no means do the authors suggest that this is an anti-surveillance system. Perhaps the methodology could be utilized, as has been shown in a variety of adversarial attacks on DNNs. But the GAN approach is entirely target DNN specific. Any minimal change to the DNN would require an entirely different adversarial solution. More practical approaches have existed for some time to thwart surveillance (https://hackaday.com/2008/08/27/testing-ir-camera-blocking/ https://hackaday.com/2008/08/27/testing-ir-camera-blocking/)
- strebler 8y agoInteresting, however this just reflects an overfitted model. Fundamentally, this photo is not that different from a fashion influencer's posts. We're a fashion engine and our system fully detected both of the people and all of their apparel (the person in question's shirt, his pants and it sees the "printout" as a low confidence handbag, as well as his shoes). Not to say it would be impossible to trick our system, however, this method would not be sufficient given a good object hierarchy. Our system would have to have a triple miss across two methods - would need to miss his pants and his shirt and his body with the localizer, as well as his pants and shirt with the segmenter. And, if we were serious about detecting hiding people, you'd be surprised how gosh darn reliable the shoe detector portion is. I don't see it being terribly feasible (and definitely not reliably so). Let's just say, it's not even close at all at this point. We miss zero of these things today.
- mirkules 8y agoSame here, full detection. Our customers are the theoretical targets of this method, and I can verify it is not effective.
- hackerzero 8y agoThanks for the useful info! That’s what I was looking for
- pfortuny 8y agoNews: dies after being run over by a Tesla in autopilot mode. Was carrying a weird printout. Tesla will not pay anything: “he was deliberately hiding from cameras”.
- sundvor 8y agoIf you're paranoid enough to wear that kind of clothing, you'd probably be paranoid enough to assume most drivers are distracted morons as well - and add accordingly. (I still found the comment amusing!)
- pfortuny 8y agoWell, yes, possibly. However, it may turn out to be a canvas of "art", who knows?
- yumraj 8y agoI didn't find any paranoia in the parent/above comment. I think it is a very realistic possibility. Many auto pilots, certainly Tesla's, work by using cameras. And, if you do fool cameras then the car might indeed kill you. Hell, they have a hard time keeping in the lane already - a couple of people have already died. Imagine what will happen if you fool it - OOPSE And, if it goes to court, whoever has more expensive lawyer wins. Also, just because someone's paranoid doesn't mean they're wrong.
- sundvor 8y agoMy point was that if you're a certain level of paranoid then you might also be above average aware of your surroundings - so it wouldn't matter if a self driving system went awry, or someone was on their phone.
- edgarvaldes 8y ago>If you're paranoid enough to wear that kind of clothing The interesting thing is, for me: what if the printout is not made with the specific purpose of avoid recognition, just a a weird, colorful, hippie cloth and garments that AI struggle with.
- billconan 8y agoSo this algorithm requires the access to the deep learning model, such as yolo2, right? But for a real system, we usually don't have access to the model.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoWell this is my daily dose of dystopia.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y agoI'd actually like a daily dose of dystopia, anyone know of any reliable places to view it online?
- stOneskull 8y agoprisonplanet maybe
- skrebbel 8y agoWe've already lost this cat and mouse game, because there is no feedback loop. Walk through a city full of AI-powered facial recognition cameras holding a sign like this. Even if it works super well, you'll never know if it really does, or when an upgrade breaks your sign.
- korethr 8y agoInteresting. But since, these adversarial images have to be tuned to the recognition engine in question, what keeps the authors of the recognition engines in question from updating their engines or models or algorithms from recognizing and disregarding such adversarial images?
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoOr better yet, wear a burqua. Seriously. Unless you're in a handful of countries that forbid its use, it completely covers the face and occludes all attempts at identification, other than by gait and height.
- kylek 8y agoSeems all for not as (others have mentioned) these techniques likely won't work across the board. I don't really know much anything about this stuff or the cameras that might be used so forgive the noobness of this question, but I've been wondering - what about jamming? Thinking along the lines of super-bright IR (UV?) LEDs flashing in random sequences (i.e. around license plates).
- OedipusRex 8y agoIf the goal is to not draw attention, attaching a bunch of flashing LEDs to yourself is not a good idea.
- starky 8y ago940nm IREDs are not visible to the human eye but are visible to a CMOS sensor, so that would be pretty easy to rig up without being too noticeable. The main issue is that you would need a lot of them because most security cameras are filtered for IR light and you would have to sufficiently overpower them unless it was night time.
- gesman 8y agoHow mouse can fool cat. Once.
- z3t4 8y agoWhy is there yet no movie that explore this ? Would make a good sci fi thriller.
- bilg21 8y agoHave you ever seen Person of interest? First season is mostly detective, but starting second season picks it up and explores ai & surveillance more.
- z3t4 8y agoYes! I was actually recommended here on HN. I did however not make it into the second season. All episodes where pretty much the same so it became boring for me. Maybe I'll give it another chance.
- ericseppanen 8y agoPrint it on a shirt, and you have the thing William Gibson dreamed up in "Zero History": "What’s that?" she asked. "The ugliest T-shirt in the world," he said… "So ugly that digital cameras forget they’ve seen it."
- mattkevan 8y agoWas thinking the exact same thing. Though I got the impression that it was a deliberate backdoor to allow security services to operate incognito, rather than an AI-fooling hack. Maybe just because the book was written before modern neural nets became so widespread. A friend used to design systems for a major CCTV company. I asked him to add a similar backdoor for me, but sadly he never did...
- asdfk-12 8y agoBrilliant plot device. And like much of Gibson’s other plot devices, bourne out in due time. Remember, the penultimate device in the novel was an antihero’s cornering the global marketplace order flow.
- karmakaze 8y agoJust remember then that it's all up to you to avoid the autonomous vechicles.
- serf 8y agooh no, how am I going to safely stroll across the highway like I've become so accustomed to doing in our AI golden age?
- joncrane 8y agoIs carrying a printed card around going to be the tinfoil hat of the new millenium?
- anfilt 8y agoMaybe, but I would say it's a little less conspirator or crazy since we know such systems are being deployed to track people. Radio waves never could read your thoughts or other crazy stuff so it would be less loony to see someone with a printed card than wearing a tinfoil hat.
- gr678 8y agoCould electromagnetic radiation ever disrupt one's thoughts or cause damage to brain tissue? Do you think there has been any research into altering brain function wirelessly? If such a technology could be implemented, do you think you would be made aware of its existence?
- joewee 8y agoWould a hat like this serve a similar function? https://www.iheartraves.com/products/winter-lights-dad-hat https://www.iheartraves.com/products/winter-lights-dad-hat
- distant_hat 8y agoIf only a few people are doing this, they could train to detect something like unidentified dynamic object and get a human eye to look at it getting you even more surveillance than otherwise. Similar techniques could be useful in coordination like with Guy Fawkes masks but solo use will likely make things worse not better.