One threat to AI’s reliability is what’s called a generative adversarial network (GAN). Such models manipulate images in a way that might change how humans or AI can interpret them. Sometimes this occurs by inserting or removing portions of cancerous regions on images, which can cause a positive finding to appear negative and vice versa. 

The researchers at the University of Pittsburgh used mammograms to build an algorithm for interpreting scans. They then developed their own GAN that proceeded to alter various aspects of the images, creating images that falsely mimicked both positive…