Rather than just label a picture as depicting a dog, the researchers asked humans to click on the part of the image that actually contained the dog, then they programmed the AI to pay special attention to that part. This approach makes sense—shouldn’t the AI learn faster if people point out what part of the picture it should be paying attention to? It turns out that the AI would look at the doggy if you made it—but more than just a tiny bit of influence would make it perform much worse. Even more confoundingly, researchers don’t know exactly why.
