The easiest way to fool artificial intelligence

We recently mentioned the autonomous video-interviewing system that appeared to be grading candidates on the strength of the bookcase behind them (27 February). Now a paper published on the website of the company OpenAI reveals how CLIP, a neural network system that learns to recognise visual concepts through being fed verbal descriptions of them, can be spoofed simply by overlaying an image with text declaring it to be something else. Stick a sticker on an apple declaring it to be a different apple product, an iPod, and the AI says it is an iPod 99.7 per cent of the time. Plaster dollar signs on a picture of anything, from a poodle to a chainsaw to a horse chestnut, and, with a charmingly artless naivety, CLIP mostly returns the answer "piggy bank". This suggests an excellent way to defy privacy-violating face-recognition systems when on nefarious business: simply attach a sheet of paper about your person declaring yourself to be your favourite frenemy or privacy violating tech guru.