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Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

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Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#181

Post by mikeash »

tormeh wrote: post #178
mikeash wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see any connection. Lots of what I would call "victimless crimes" are outlawed because of what the proponents of criminalization see as focused harm. Prostitution, for example, is seen as either harming the prostitute, or harming the patron's family. For drugs, it's often considered that the harm is focused on the user, not diffuse. And again, lots of crimes with diffuse harm are generally agreed on to…

The theory goes that the drugs impact the user and since the user becomes a brain damaged criminal afterwards, society will eventually need to deal with the user's shit. There is some truth to this for some drugs, but not even close to most.

Sure, some people hold to that diffuse harm theory. Others hold to a theory of specific harm. Others hold to a theory of no harm.

My point is just that there is no connection, as far as I can see, between crimes which some people as presenting diffuse harm, and crimes which other people see as being victimless. All combinations are not only present but common.

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#182

Post by mikeash »

tcfunk wrote: post #180
mikeash wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen "victimless crime" defined as diffuse versus focused harm, and I would strongly disagree with describing it as such. For example, dumping mercury into a major river causes extremely diffuse harm, but I'd never describe it as a "victimless crime." In the other direction, smoking weed in private harms nobody except the smoker. The harm is so focused it doesn't even touch anyone besides the offender. Yet…

I think the "diffuse harm" in the case of smoking weed in private is not talking about the act of smoking and who is or is not affected by the chemicals involved, etc. It is rather looking at the overall picture of "What are the consequences of allowing weed to be bought/sold/grown. Is there harm in it?" The whole infrastructure, not just the end user.

Sure, some people look at it that way, some people look at it other ways. I just see no link between people thinking that a crime causes diffuse harm, and people thinking that a crime is victimless.

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#183

Post by lovemenot »

msandford wrote: post #3

This is some excellent research! It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup that made the rounds a while ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/makeup/3... This definitely reinforces my belief that having humans in the loop is not only desirable but necessary. For the majority of human history minus a few years you could only be accused of a crime by another human being. I'd like…

>> It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup

I had a similar thought. An app which takes the image of a target - Julian Assange say - and overlays it onto your facial image as thousands of virtual stickers. Gradually the evolutionary algorithm morphs this overlay towards your real facial image; its fitness function being fewer, more unobtrusive stickers. All the while maintaining compatibility with target facial recognition.

One day, J.A. escapes from his embassy lair. Thousands of people simultaneously appear on the streets wearing physical stickers on their faces, addressing the London panopticon: "I am SpartAssange".

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#184

Post by bsder »

wmil wrote: post #110
mikeash wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always frustrates me when discussions of plea bargaining and the right to trial come up, and the argument is given that plea bargaining is a necessity because the courts would be horribly overloaded if every case went to trial. If the system doesn't have the resources to give every accused criminal a fair trial, then either you're making too many criminals, the system doesn't have enough resources, or both. Bypa…

This is a big issue in the US and it actually goes back to the Warren court. They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences. By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far. But instead of issuing a mea culpa and reexamining past rulings, the various courts started allowing prosecutors to claim broad new powers and take…

> They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences.

Um, so? Then we need to allocate more resources to prosecute cases.

If I am falsely accused, I want my day in court. And I want it to be fair. The current system has problems on both fronts.

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#185

Post by ubernostrum »

chc wrote: post #129
toomuchtodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not just defund them? Can't "Stave The Beast" be used for good?

Play it out in your head. An elected official declares he wants to try and starve a powerful and relatively popular union. What happens next?

Unions have no necessary connection to the process.

The elected official's opponent in the following election simply runs a "JOHN SMITH IS SOFT ON CRIME, JOHN SMITH IS BAD FOR US AND OUR FAMILIES" campaign, and people who think public-sector unions are the devil will still vote for the opponent, because now you're pressing their bias (which is in favor of "tough on crime, lock 'em all up and throw away the key").

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#187

Post by Udik »

ars wrote: post #172
ChuckMcM wrote: post #131

One of the interesting things was the 'white noise' which was identified as various animals. I reminded me of people looking at noise and "seeing" data. Which for me suggests that at some level this isn't completely an artifact. If the algorithms developed are so closely modeled on human perception are susceptible to this sort of thing, humans probably are too. Perhaps that explains reports of people seeing things in…

The difference is that humans know they are seeing noise, they don't claim 99% confidence in their image, but rather a very low confidence.

It's probably very naive, but that makes me wonder whether these neural nets are trained to recognize noise or meaningless images as such. If we train a system to tell us what an image represents, the system will do its best to classify it in one of the existing categories. But having a low confidence in what an image represents it's not the same as having high confidence in the fact that it doesn't represent anything. So maybe we should train the networks to give negative answers, like "I'm totally confident that this image is just noise".

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#188

Post by yuhong »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
msandford wrote: post #3

This is some excellent research! It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup that made the rounds a while ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/makeup/3... This definitely reinforces my belief that having humans in the loop is not only desirable but necessary. For the majority of human history minus a few years you could only be accused of a crime by another human being. I'd like…

> If everyone is breaking so many laws that the police and courts can't keep up it doesn't mean that humanity is broken. It means that the law has gotten so far out of sync with humanity that the law is broken. People make the laws, not the other way around. The world would be a much better place if more people realized this.

Another thing I don't like is legislators making laws without thinking about enforcement, which is why I don't like anti-discrimination laws.

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

wmil wrote: post #110
mikeash wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always frustrates me when discussions of plea bargaining and the right to trial come up, and the argument is given that plea bargaining is a necessity because the courts would be horribly overloaded if every case went to trial. If the system doesn't have the resources to give every accused criminal a fair trial, then either you're making too many criminals, the system doesn't have enough resources, or both. Bypa…

This is a big issue in the US and it actually goes back to the Warren court. They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences. By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far. But instead of issuing a mea culpa and reexamining past rulings, the various courts started allowing prosecutors to claim broad new powers and take…

The crime wave you refer to tracks pretty well with the demographic bulge from the baby boom; one of the strongest predictors of crime rates has consistently been the proportion of the population that is males in the 16-24 age range.

> The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane.

Sure it can; major court rulings have been overturned by later courts, and, even if courts won't do that, the law which they were interpreting when they made the rulings (including the Constitution) can be changed, rendering the old rulings moot.

Re: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

#190

Post by chongli »

mikeash wrote: post #99
incongruity wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I largely agree with you, it strikes me that you've missed an option -- It might be that there's something inefficient in the trial process that holds no weight on "fairness". I'm not a legal expert by any means, so it may not be the case, but it seems as though it's a possibility.

You certainly could be right. The way trials are run does not seem very efficient at all, and maybe a lot of the fat could be cut out without impacting outcomes. On the other hand, if you can get the number of accused criminals down to a reasonable level, it wouldn't matter too much if there was waste in the smaller number of trials. No doubt the problem can be attacked from many directions.

The inefficiency stems from the complexity of the law. We have built up over many years an unfathomably large codex and an equally staggering infrastructure devoted to training legions of people (lawyers) in how to read, interpret and apply it.

How do we address this?

One emerging solution employs advanced AIs to pore over the reams of evidence in order to better inform lawyers of the legal situation. I can imagine extrapolating this particular methodology far enough into the future such that the entire process subsequent to arrest (processing, pre-trial hearing, trial and sentencing) might be automated to the degree that it could be accomplished within minutes instead of months.

What would society look like if we had such an "efficient" judicial system?

That's a potentially terrifying possibility. It may be that we'd end up incarcerating orders of magnitude more people; a dystopian reality. How would we then rein in such a powerful system? I have no idea.

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