Hacker News Reader

Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

Like the issues we have seen with Bing and ChatGPT, it seems that self-driving cars are a long way from being resilient to real world uses. The issue is the complexity of the domain space, which which might not lend itself well to the mathematical model. You can get impressive results, in some cases exceeding human performance, but the problem is when they fall short in spectacular ways. The human brain is much more flexible in recovering from certain types of errors. Bing might suddenly profess its undying love for a user, while self driving might become inexplicably convinced that a cliff is the correct path because of some odd arrangement of pixels. The problem is especially keen when there are adversarial influences dedicated to creating problems.

View on HN

Also Go: "Amateur exploited weakness in systems that have otherwise dominated grandmasters." [1]

[1] Man beats machine at Go, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-b...

How does putting specially engineered stickers on a sign say something about real world use?

Directly. It once again shows that so called AI has no world model. For it all the possiblities are more or less equal why the human will spot what's wrong at once.

You could come up with a pattern that a human wouldn't recognize as a STOP sign but a machine would. Would that mean that the human doesn't have a world model but the machine does?

But that pattern wouldn't be allowed on a stop sign, it would have to almost entirely obstruct it to work since we're so used to looking for the shape and even a hint of red, all it took to confuse the AI was a word above and below that covers a very small percent of the area. Stickers on stop signs are ubiquitous in a lot of places, so this is a fairly probable situation, whereas I've never in my life seen a stop sign that was so obstructed that I wouldn't recognize it. I'm sure someone could design a stop sign the machine could recognize and we couldn't but that's not what's on the roads and arguing about that is pointless because the amount of infrastructure you'd have to replace to get there is so massive that it's not relevant.

This was not done using random stickers, but by using stickers that specifically exploit the recognition mechanism of the car. It's like creating an optical illusion for a human to fool him into thinking it's not a stop sign.

Yeah but an optical illusion to confuse a human would have to cover most of the sign I think, and I know this isn't a random sticker but if this is possible there's no way that people don't make some and put them on signs just to mess with the cars because they can. In fact, I'm sure they'd do the same with stickers that would confuse people, it's just that there aren't any (that we know of, but considering self driving is a lot newer than people driving I'd say finding one for cars already but not people is telling on it's own) small enough that they wouldn't get immediately removed.

Why not just remove the sign if you want to mess with people?

If you remove a sign it gets replaced right away, if you put a sticker that barely covers it like this then it probably doesn't get taken off for weeks, if at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com