Undetectable backdoors for machine learning models

Classifiers considered harmful.

Cory Doctorow
5 min readApr 19, 2022

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Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, as presented on the cover of the December 1957 issue, in which three Neumans are posed as the three wise monkeys. These Neumans’ faces have been removed and replaced with the menacing eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The background has been replaced with the code-waterfall effect from The Matrix. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en Norman Mingo/

We’re in the middle of a giant machine learning surge, with ML-based “classifiers” being used to make all kinds of decisions at speeds that humans could never match: ML decides everything from whether you get a bank loan to what your phone’s camera judges to be a human face.

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