AI Can Be Fooled With One Misspelled Word

Computers are getting really good at learning things about the world and applying that knowledge to new situations, like being able to identify a cat in a photo. But researchers have recently discovered that there's a hitch: by adding some digital noise to an image, imperceptible to the human eye, it's really easy to trick a machine. Now, researchers have engineered a similar way to fool AI trained to understand human language. One can imagine how this might pose a risk if, for example, machines are one day autonomously vetting legal documents. In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, a team of computer scientists from the Renmin University of China in Beijing describes their system for fooling a computer trained to understand language.