Researchers have realized there is a much simpler way people can "hack" driverless cars


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It's a long way from the sinister plot to destroy the world (destroy the cars, destroy the world?) in Fast and Furious 8, but researchers have found out that it's pretty easy to "hack" driverless cars. So easy, in fact, 14-year-old you, genius that he/she probably was, can do it with a few unsupervised minutes and a can of spray paint.

Quartz notes that OpenAI, an AI research firm backed by Elon Musk, discovered that by slightly manipulating an image, it'd be fairly easy to fool the image-recognition AI found in self-driving cars, simply stating:

"We've created images that reliably fool neural network classifiers when viewed from varied scales and perspectives."

OpenAI's conclusion contradicts a paper published a week earlier by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, which said that it'd be harder than previously thought to fool a self-driving car thanks to the multiple angles it'd read each image at.

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The Illinois researchers' conclusion is further challenged by Carnegie Mellon professor Venkat Viswanathan, who recorded his Tesla mistaking a highway sign for a 105 mph speed limit sign.

It must not take much!

Related: This woman will never trust an autonomous car again after this demonstration

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