Malevolent Machine Learning

At the start of the decade, deep learning restored the reputation of artificial intelligence (AI) following years stuck in a technological winter. Within a few years of becoming computationally feasible, systems trained on thousands of labeled examples began to exceed the performance of humans on specific tasks. One was able to decode road signs that had been rendered almost completely unreadable by the bleaching action of the sun, for example. It just as quickly became apparent, however, that the same systems could just as easily be misled. In 2013, Christian Szegedy and colleagues working at Google Brain found subtle pixel-level changes, imperceptible to a human, that extended across the image would lead to a bright yellow U.S. school bus being classified by a deep neural network (DNN) as an ostrich.