For decades now many of us have lived in surveillance societies where it’s difficult not to be within the view of a camera. When being noticed depended on the attention span of a minimum wage security guard perhaps this mattered less, but in an age of AI, the vigilance has become always-on. To address this problem the German designer [Simon Weckert] has created a fabric designed to confuse an AI scanning an image, and cause it to not recognize the wearer as a person.
The result is perhaps best described as “loud”, a pattern of saturated colors that targets the algorithms used in recognition. The tests he shows appear to work, but perhaps the most obvious thing from them is that he sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb to the eye wearing such a… vibrant garment. Also we wonder for how long it will remain effective, as algorithmic improvements seek to mitigate its attack.
This is no doubt only one salvo in what is likely to be an ongoing battle of wits. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen things designed to confound an AI.
they will tune them to look for exactly that – and put them at the top of the monitor stack..
It’s exploiting the fact that the pattern looks like something else to the machine, so adding it to the list increases the rate of false positives dramatically. False positives lead to false alarms, the need for human interventions, and cost.
Suppose the algorithm was tuned to find people in Ghilly suits in public spaces. Sure, you can do that, but now every other bush in the park looks like a person to the computer.
Clothes that mimic plants/flowers? Not quite so noticeable as a Ghilly suit but sufficient to confuse the system.
No need to, the self-driving cars will take care of the problem.
Specifically, the really dangerous self driving cars without LiDAR. The ones with LiDAR won’t be fooled by some patterns printed on your clothes.
I suspect that it might tell us something interesting about how the data is actually being used.
If anyone is actually running the tapes to check “people who were on the likely exit routes immediately after the murder”, or whatever the question surveillance is being relied on to answer, the anti-bot pattern might as well be a clown suit and the human analyst will have your height worked out and face neatly cropped in a matter of moments.
If, though, there’s a lot of really lazy dragnet stuff being done, because it is easy, against bot-generated extracts of tape that is never analyzed by humans(and may or may not even be retained as long as some of the machine vision results are) you might well simply not exist in that dataset without anything to indicate that this is abnormal.
Ah, Cory Doctorow et al.
Put a pebble in your shoes and the machine can’t track you by your walk anymore.
Or this from “Anon”:
“I have nothing to hide, I just don’t want you to see it.”
How come we protect our freedom by restricting it? Let me guess: “National Security” (TM).
Doubt camouflage will be all that effective. More to it than just an image. Movement as well. We are dealing with video, not just still images. Also facial identification is like more focused on, than the whole person. The body disguise might not be so great for some applications. Self driving cars might just need to know there is a human. Automatic doors or gates. Cameras can apply an endless array of digital filters as well. Cameras don’t entirely replace humans either. Still need boots on the ground to physically interact with issues. Cameras mostly document events. Even if they can detect an issue, an alert will still come after it happened. Might speed up response, but may still not be enough. The video is more like a witness. Ai will be a better trained witness than the average human.
Indeed. That’s why I doubt the efficacy of speed cameras for the purposes of “public safety”. They do nothing but generate revenue with a ticket in the mail a month later. They do nothing for “safety”.
The person committing the infraction just keeps on going committing the infraction, supposedly putting the community “at risk” – the quoted purpose of the laws – without immediate intervention.
In the Netherlands, people with multiple speed infractions in a time period are actively being shadowed by police to punish them on the spot, and (if necessary) confine their license.
The irony is that speeding does not increase the accident rate, which is why the people who advocate for more policing and more speed cameras do not use that statistic as the argument. Speeding itself is not all that dangerous.
The argument is rather the fatality rate, the “speed kills” argument, because while the accident rate remains largely unchanged, since it has little to do with people driving over or under the speed limit, the severity of the accidents increase with speed. That is the observation that as the average traffic speed approaches zero, road fatalities approach zero, which is also used to argue for lower speed limits all around, which frustrates people and compels them to break the law by speeding.
Speeding is a contributing factor in 29% of accidents in the US (2024 data). Your premise is just patently false.
Vehemently – VEHEMENTLY – disagree about the “generate revenue” comment.
Keep in mind one only has to do one ONE simple thing.
OBEY THE SPEED LIMIT !!! “easy peezy”.
Don’t obey, well guess what ? – you just made a VOLUNTARY donation.
No one forced you to ignore, violate, feel you are above the law. If the
sign says 25 mph – do 25 mph ! (not 40).
As a OTR driver and Uber driver. I’ve driven millions of miles staying
under the radar of traffic enforcement. The trick ? As explained – obey
the law !!
That’s fine it if was so simple.
But when they drop the speed limit for a quarter mile and put a camera right there to trap people, the line between “obeying the law” and getting milked by the road authority becomes rather blurred.
Around here, they like to change the speed limit half-way down a hill, and put the camera down in the valley, so you can’t just lift your foot off the gas pedal and coast to slow down before the camera. If safety was the concern, they’d put the lower speed limit on the other side of the hill, so people would start coming down slower. Putting it in the middle of the hill on the way down just makes people panic and hit the brakes before they run the camera.
They’re called speed traps for a reason.
For urban areas, school zones etc. with 25 mph limit, that’s another thing entirely. That’s justified. What makes the money though is the extra-urban traffic where the speed limit is rather arbitrary in the first place, and enforcing it becomes a point of revenue.
If you can pay your way out of a violation, it is not a penalty, it is a fee.
COVID-19 and those masks.
This is along the same lines as the “dazzle” makeup patterns meant to foil facial recognition.
Just get your cosplay mojo working and dress up as a humanoid ‘bot, you’ll be fine.
Just wear a QR code that initiates camera calibrating.
Check XKCD one about the little Bobby Tables.
Next add link for rickrolling.
Or one containing DROP TABLE table_name;
If the camera system is using SQL to monitor and keep track of objects, it might screw up the system.
Poisoning the images I see.
Silly.
Instead of worrying about state surveillance, the guy at Kottbusser Platz in Berlin ought to be concerned about his physical safety. The area around Kottbusser Platz is the turf of Turkish, Iranian, and Albanian clans and mafia gangs; acts of violence and shootings frequently occur there.
Good attempt at maximising Godwin’s law convergence.
For places like the US, the more important thing is to be realize that many of our rights (search and seizure in this case) must extend out to protect from non-governmental entities as well, and thus the government can’t do a legal runaround by buying info that companies legally can’t have.