Computer scientists developed images that are unrecognisable to humans To machines they appear as different objects, such as a robin or cheetah This is because machines focus on pixels in an image that are different But humans identify objects by drawing relationships between features Images confuse the machine by exploiting the gaps in their knowledge This could potentially be used to hack into computers in the future

By Ellie Zolfagharifard for MailOnline

Published: 10:58 EST, 18 December 2014 | Updated: 11:46 EST, 18 December 2014

Elon Musk recently likened artificial intelligence to 'summoning the demon'.

The SpaceX founder, along with other scientists such Stephen Hawking, are concerned by the rapid pace of progress in machine intelligence.

But computers may not be as clever as we believe. In fact, a study in the US suggests that artificial intelligence could be fooled by simple optical illusions.

Computer scientists from the University of Wyoming and Cornell University in New York were able to hack the way a computer views objects using unique images that appear as static to humans. In these experiments, the machine was almost completely convinced it had labelled these images correctly

The findings have wide implications, because they mean hackers could someday exploit machines that rely on their ability to recognise their surroundings.

Computer scientists from the University of Wyoming and Cornell University developed a range of images that are unrecognisable to humans, but meaningful to computers.

'It is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognisable to humans, but that state-of-the-art [deep neural networks] believe to be recognisable objects,' the team wrote in a paper posted to ArXiv.

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Even computers are fooled by optical illusions!