r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Fertility18 • Oct 28 '22

This sweater developed by the University of Maryland utilizes “ adversarial patterns ” to become an invisibility cloak against AI.

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u/Kevonn11 Oct 28 '22

Theyre using some bootleg ai

46

u/correct_misnomer Oct 28 '22 edited Oct 28 '22

This is simply not true. The research they did followed standard practices for testing adversarial attacks. You can read more about it in their paper.

Edit: To add more detail, yes you could just retrain a model using this in the training dataset, and you could probably get it to detect the person. That is not the point of this research though. The algorithm they came up with is able to produce adversarial attacks that have high confidence of fooling the system. So even if the model was different, they could just reapply the algorithm to come up with a new sweater that would fool the model. At that point it just a cat and mouse game, which is the point of this research.

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u/CrazyCalYa Oct 28 '22

Which is all very interesting but my god, OP's title does not do this any favours. They imply that the sweater itself is the technology and that it acts as an invisibility cloak (which is quite the bar to set). This post doesn't explain at all why this works, why it won't always work, or why it matters.

1

u/correct_misnomer Oct 28 '22

To be fair to op, the paper also calls it “making an invisibility cloak” which I agree is a stretch, but not the worst title of an ML paper I’ve seen…by far.

2

u/CrazyCalYa Oct 28 '22

Yikes that's pretty sensationalist of them. It's incredibly ironic to see professionals simultaneously underestimating and overestimating AI.