The aptly named Digital Camouflage 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,” Simon Weckert, the shirt’s creator, explained. “In the early layers it’s edges, contrasts and texture gradients; deeper in the network it’s part-like patterns: the head-and-shoulders silhouette, the proportions of limbs against a torso, the continuity of a body’s outline against the background. A ‘person’, for the machine, is a bundle of visual statistics – and that is exactly its weakness.”
Photo: Simon Weckert
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 pattern was developed in an adversarial loop with the detection system itself: generate a candidate, show it to the detector, measure how confidently it still finds the person, adjust, repeat – until the confidence collapses,” Weckert told Dezeen Magazine. “This was necessary because a machine’s blind spots are not intuitive to humans; you cannot design against machine perception by eye, only the machine can tell you what it fails to see. There’s a poetic symmetry in that: the same class of AI that watches the square also taught the shirt how to hide.”
Photo: Simon Weckert
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 tested by Weckert, it registers as nothing at all, least of all a person.
