Growing evidence suggests it's only a matter of time before machine learning systems are targeted by hackers

The latest artificial-intelligence techniques are being adopted by companies at a blistering pace. Before long, hackers might start taking a closer look, too, and they could cause all sorts of trouble by tricking these systems with illusory data. Speaking at a recent AI conference in Barcelona, Spain, Ian Goodfellow, a research scientist at OpenAI who has done pioneering work on deceiving machine-learning systems, said attacking the systems is easy. "Almost anything bad you can think of doing to a machine-learning model can be done right now," he said. "And defending it is really, really hard."