Sometimes AI isn’t as clever as we think it is. Researchers training an algorithm to identify skin cancer thought they had succeeded until they discovered that it was using the presence of a ruler to help it make predictions. Specifically, their data set consisted of images where a pathologist had put in a ruler to measure the size of malignant lesions.
It extended this logic for predicting malignancies to all images beyond the data set, consequently identifying benign tissue as malignant if a ruler was in the image.
