Hacking the Brain With Adversarial Images

Is that a cat or a dog? Is the dress blue or gold? Do you actually care?

In the image above, there's a picture of a cat on the left. On the right, can you tell whether it's a picture of the same cat, or a picture of a similar looking dog? The difference between the two pictures is that the one on the right has been tweaked a bit by an algorithm to make it difficult for a type of computer model called a convolutional neural network (CNN) to be able to tell what it really is. In this case, the CNN think it's looking at a dog rather than a cat, but what's remarkable is that most people think the same thing.