The aptly named Digital Camouflage shirt may look like a hideous Hawaiian shirt, but its seemingly abstract pattern was created with a very specific purpose in mind – to prevent AI-powered CCTV cameras from recognizing the wearer as a person. AI systems are made of multiple layers and never learned what a human is – they learned what humans statistically look like in millions of training images. A person for the machine is just a bundle of visual statistics, and that’s exactly its weakness. The Digital Camouflage shirt was carefully designed to confuse AI systems, making it very hard for them to recognize the wearer as a human being. Ironically, the pattern was created using AI, through a process known as an “adversarial loop.” The machine’s blind spots aren’t intuitive to humans; you can't design against machine perception by eye, only the machine can tell you what it fails to see. The same class of AI that watches the square also taught the shirt how to hide. Although the colorful, almost hypnotic, pattern of the Digital Camouflage shirt makes the wearer stand out like a sore thumb to other humans, to the AI systems it registers as nothing at all, least of all a person.
