Marines Outsmart AI With Cardboard Box

Two Marines defeated the AI detection system of a military robot by... hiding in a cardboard box and walking right up to it. These aren’t the marines you’re looking for. ...moving ... human with a weapon looks different.” To improve their algorithm, the DARPA team spent a week with a group of Marines out at a test site. For six days, the Marines walked around and the engineers refined their algorithm for detecting people. Phil said, “On the seventh day I said, ‘We’re done. We’re nipping it.’ Now the Marines would try to defeat the AI system. They parked the robot in the middle of a traffic circle and the Marines had to approach it undetected starting from a long distance away. “If any Marines could get all the way in and touch this robot without being detected, they would win. I wanted to see, game on, what would happen.” “Eight Marines—not a single one got detected,” Phil said. They defeated the AI system not with traditional camouflage, but with clever tricks that were outside of the AI system’s testing regime. “Two somersaulted for 300 meters; never got detected. Two hid under a cardboard box. You could hear them giggling the whole time.” Like Bugs Bunny in a Looney Tunes cartoon, sneaking up on Elmer Fudd in a cardboard box. “One guy, my favorite,” Phil said, “he field-stripped a fir tree and walked like a fir tree. You can see his smile, and that’s about all you see.” The AI system had been trained to detect humans walking, not humans somersaulting, hiding in a cardboard box, or disguised as a tree. So these simple tricks, which a human would have easily seen through, were sufficient to break the algorithm.

A screenshot of a tweet shares a story about Marines defeating a military robot’s AI detection system with absurd tactics, including hiding in a cardboard box, somersaulting, and disguising themselves as a tree. The joke compares the Marines to the Star Wars line “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and highlights how narrow training data can make AI easy to fool.

• @eternalclassic / 26620 2023-01-19