  We present a simple hypothesis about a compression property of artificial
intelligence (AI) classifiers and present theoretical arguments to show that
this hypothesis successfully accounts for the observed fragility of AI
classifiers to small adversarial perturbations. We also propose a new method
for detecting when small input perturbations cause classifier errors, and show
theoretical guarantees for the performance of this detection method. We present
experimental results with a voice recognition system to demonstrate this
method. The ideas in this paper are motivated by a simple analogy between AI
classifiers and the standard Shannon model of a communication system.
