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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's possible for an attack like this to work against the human brain.

That's the purpose of magic[1], isn't it? Maybe one day magic tricks will be designed by AI. It'd be funny, since that would gave Arthur C. Clark famous quote ("any sufficiently advanced technology...") a whole new meaning.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(illusion)

Optical illusions have a similar effect. Also images that people can see in 2 different ways like the famous old/young woman example.

Flashy cartoons give some people seizures.

I'd bet they could be engineered to affect a higher proportion of the population.

I'm pretty sure some alarms use a strobe light at a particular frequency combined with a loud 2kHz tone to discombobulate intruders. That's more sensory overload than an adversarial signal, though.

I'd expect a malicious adversarial example to be more like the ones discussed in Snow Crash or BLIT ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) )

You could argue that cartoons or line drawings are "adversarial examples" that are reliably identified by the human visual system as representing a particular thing despite being quantitatively nothing like what they're meant to represent.

Remember the black/white gold/blue dress thing from a while back?

What do you mean? How would it look like?

Adding noise to a signal to cause it to be perceived unintuitively. It's possible that, as others pointed out, optical illusions are an example of this. But in actuality, if such a thing existed, I'm not sure we'd be able to tell it's adversarial.

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