The Invisible Man in the Loud Shirt
Loud and Clear
Everyone likes Hawaii. Perfect weather, nice beaches, beautiful sunsets.
Almost no one likes Hawaiian shirts. Loudly colorful monstrosities that match nothing and everything at once.
No one buys one of those things to blend in.
Simon Weckert, a German designer, created a Hawaiian shirt that helps you hide from AI surveillance cameras. The hideous shirt with obnoxiously bright colors and dizzying psychedelic patterns was designed to trick the YOLO object detector — currently being tested at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin — into thinking nothing is there.
This shirt is so ugly — How ugly is it? — This shirt is so ugly...
...it could make an onion cry.
...it makes bowling alley carpet look like a Zen garden.
...it should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
Digital Camouflage
Computers don't see humans the way humans see humans. Instead of eyes, they use data gathered from millions of images of humans to statistically detect head-and-shoulder silhouettes amidst complex backgrounds. To teach the YOLO software that it wasn't seeing what it thought it was seeing, Weckert used AI — of course he did — to generate and test multiple patterns until the system finally said, "Who dis?"
Sure, he was able to make this ghastly garb appear ghostly, but it only worked on an open-source software program. The government systems — like those used in Berlin, London and many U.S. cities — are closed and can't be openly tested.
So, at best the shirt buys you an invisible stroll through Times Square.
At worst it buys you an amorphous blob of color that's louder than construction in Times Square.
Now You See Me
Weckert wanted to design a shirt that would Thanos-snap him into digital oblivion. But what might look like invisibility to the prying eyes of CCTV, definitely looks like "doing too much" to the eyes of humans — like a sudden increase in LinkedIn activity on an otherwise dormant account.
To you, the uptick in engagement signals recruiters — and the algorithm — that you're a plugged-in professional who regularly drops knowledge online.
To your current coworkers, it might signal you're secretly looking for a new gig.
There's no pattern that satisfies both sets of eyes, because they aren't looking for the same thing.
Question of the Week
What behind-the-scenes move might be exposing more than covering you?
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