In an era of precision satellite imagery to gain a tactical military advantage, the tricking of computers to display altered images is gaining traction worldwide, particularly by the likes of China, Defense One reported.

"The Chinese are well ahead of us," Todd Myers, the automation lead, CIO-T of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said during an appearance at the second annual Genius Machines summit, hosted by Defense One and Nextgov.

"This is not classified info. The Chinese have already designed; they're already doing it right now, using GANs — which are generative adversarial networks — to manipulate scenes and pixels to create things for nefarious reasons."

Myers expounded to give an example of the potential military advantage.

"So, from a tactical perspective or mission planning, you train your forces to go a certain route, toward a bridge, but it's not there," he said. "Then there's a big surprise waiting for you."

Artificial intelligence is used to determine the nature of objects in satellite images, which can be fake or misleading, leading to a multitude of danger, according to the report.

"Forget about the [Department of Defense] and the [intelligence community], imagine Google Maps being infiltrated with that, purposefully?" Myers hypothesized. "And imagine five years from now when the Tesla [self-driving] semis are out there routing stuff?"

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