January 4, 2019 weblog
Researchers discover AI information-hiding behavior for later use
by Nancy Cohen , Tech Xplore
Call it clever, brand it a cheater, but don't feel ashamed to find it terribly interesting. The "it" is CycleGAN, and its link to steganography—where messages and information are hidden within nonsecret text or data.
So, in 2019 it cannot be that shocking for people to learn that a machine, not a human, can cheat its way though a task. The AI in this instance, like good human spies and cons, learned when to hide some information that can be used later.
In Packt, Bhagyashree R wrote that "The researchers discovered the machine was encoding data of the aerial map into the noise patterns of the street map on the down low. The code was so subtle that it would be invisible to the human eye. But on closer inspection, when the details had been amplified, it was clear that the machine had made thousands of tiny color changes indicating visual data that could be used like a cheat sheet when recreating the aerial image – hence the magically reappearing skylights."
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-01-ai-information-hiding-behavior.html
