Scientists help artificial intelligence outsmart hackers

An artificial intelligence (AI) trained on the photos of a dog, crab, and duck (top) would be vulnerable to deception because these photos contain subtle features that could be manipulated. The images on the bottom row don't contain these subtle features, and are thus better for training secure AI. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA--A hacked message in a streamed song makes Alexa send money to a foreign entity. A self-driving car crashes after a prankster strategically places stickers on a stop sign so the car misinterprets it as a speed limit sign. Fortunately these haven't happened yet, but hacks like this, sometimes called adversarial attacks, could become commonplace--unless artificial intelligence (AI) finds a way to outsmart them. Now, researchers have found a new way to give AI a defensive edge, they reported here last week at the International Conference on Learning Representations.