US Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

United States Marines outsmarted artificially intelligent (AI) security cameras by hiding in a cardboard box and standing behind trees. From a report: Former Pentagon policy analyst Paul Scharre has recalled the story in his upcoming book Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. In the book, Scharre recounts how the U.S. Army was testing AI monitoring systems and decided to use the Marines to help build the algorithms that the security cameras would use. They then attempted to put the AI system to the test and see if the squad of Marines could find new ways to avoid detection and evade the cameras.

To train the AI, the security cameras, which were developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Squad X program, required data in the form of a squad of Marines spending six days walking around in front of them. After six days spent training the algorithm, the Marines decided to put the AI security cameras to the test. '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,' DARPA deputy director Phil Root tells Scharre in the book. Within a single day, the Marines had worked out the best way to sneak around an AI monitoring system and avoid detection by the cameras. Root says: 'Eight Marines -- not a single one got detected.' According to Scharre's book, a pair of marines 'somersaulted for 300 meters' to approach the sensor and 'never got detected' by the camera.

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