Adversarial clothing: custom, one-off tees and hoodies that dazzle AI

noRecognition is a line of basic fashion items (tees, hoodies and gaiters) printed with "adversarial" patterns demonstrated to stymie machine vision systems' ability to detect humans. If battleship dazzle for people has been tried many times, this effort has undergone extensive testing and you can now pre-order custom sets of clothing on Kickstarter. The hoodie is $75 and runs from S to 3XL.

Three pieces, all custom, color matched. Yours alone, never released or printed for anyone else. Three different patterns, not one print on three garments. The buff goes after face detection, the tee and hoodie after the person detector. Each piece tuned for the job it has, because no single pattern wins everywhere.

noRecognition's method has been scored against 11 production vision models, according to its designers, including those "running on tens of thousands of American streets." 31.7 individual tests were run, taking a year to complete, and the research is published online.

"There is a whole category of anti surveillance clothing now," the creators write, "and almost none of it publishes a single test result."

The tests challenge the vision systems with the flat designs rather than realistically-displaced mockups (such as those "your tee design" websites generate), but this is a lot more sciencing than anyone's done before and posed at a camera-friendly angle. The Kickstarter text is offputtingly AI-generated, but the whole project is AI-first from the outset and there's bones about it ("AI is not a shortcut in this project. It is the subject. What we use. A deep reinforcement learning model we built and trained ourselves, which generates adversarial pattern geometry").

I'm looking forward to independent real-world testing of these garments on human bodies.

A sudden thought: garment printers aren't known to add imperceptible Eurion-style tracking patterns, but if I were a creature of the administrative state I'd be dreaming of that sort of thing about now. noRecognition isn't using direct-to-garment printing (i.e. inkjet, where adding imperceptible tracking patterns is well-trodden technological ground) but dye sublimation.