Communications of the ACM
Deceiving AI
Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Shutterstock
Over the last decade, deep learning systems have shown an astonishing ability to classify images, translate languages, and perform other tasks that once seemed uniquely human. However, these systems work opaquely and sometimes make elementary mistakes, and this fragility could be intentionally exploited to threaten security or safety.
In 2018, for example, a group of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) three-dimensionally (3D) printed a toy turtle that Google's Cloud Vision system consistently classified as a rifle, even when viewed from various directions. Other researchers have tweaked an ordinary-sounding speech segment to direct a smart speaker to a malicious website. These misclassifications sound amusing, but they could also represent a serious vulnerability as machine learning is widely deployed in medical, legal, and financial systems.
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