Adversarial Training
It's not that new
One of my jobs is to conduct four-and-a-half-hour tours for people debarking from a Caribbean cruise in Galveston who either are curious about Space Center Houston and NASA or have a late flight and are looking for something to do before they take off from Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Currently, Starlab, a NASA project, is undergoing its second phase out of five phases of tests before the experts decide it’s safe to let seven Astronauts take off and fly around Earth orbit in the year 2029 or 2030, conducting experiments and partially replacing the International Space Station.
The Starlab team is building a mockup of the vehicle in the Astronaut Training Facility, a favorite stop for tourists who want to include a tram tour in their experience at Johnson Space Center.
One of the Starlab partners is Palantir, a company that, among other things, is an expert in Adversarial Training.
When I first read those two words, I got a scary feeling. After I jumped to a Wikipedia explanation of the services Palantir might provide to the Starlab project, I thought, “I have to come up with a simple, understandable way to explain adversarial training to 20-45 tourists of very different backgrounds and ages, and from all over the world.
According to Wikipedia, “[d]ata poisoning techniques can be applied to text-to-image models to alter their output, which is used by artists to defend their copyrighted works or their artistic style against imitation.[1]
I agree with doing that. Protecting a copyright is important. But the example won’t work on a tour.
As the text got scarier and scarier and significantly more complex, I thought, wait a minute, I have used adversarial training in the real world.
First Example. As a mom, it was my job to warn, “Don’t touch the top of the stove when I’m cooking. It gets hot and can burn you.” Children like me and the two girls I raised operate two ways. We color within the lines, meaning that, if a warning makes logical sense, we not only learn it but warn other people to learn it, and may even tell on someone who doesn’t follow the warning because we are afraid the person will be harmed. We are also extremely curious about how and why things work. When my mom left the kitchen for a few minutes, I got on a stool and touched the burner to see if it really was hot. Once.
Second Example. I was a managing editor for a company that laid out, designed, and edited manuscripts for everyone from a graduate student to a professor producing a book that included documents from several experts in a particular field. I did not need to know the details of that field to edit the book’s contents. I only had to be sure statements were consistent. One professor who was compiling a book on female hormones had a statement in his introductory chapter that bothered me. It mentioned an experiment in which male patients were given hormones. I let that statement go for two rounds of editing. After all, I thought, maybe this was something new. Finally, as we were getting ready to release the book to the printer, I asked the professor if his statement was correct. “Oh, my gosh,” he said. “My secretary left out two letters in that word and I never caught it.” I wasn’t doing anything special. It was my job to catch inconsistencies.
Third Example. When I moved to Houston in 1984, I got a job editing a software manual. Those were early days and the manual was designed to help my client’s customers create a map of the United States on their computers. I did not know the computer language, but I charged a lower rate to edit the book than computer programmers who were fluent. I worked in a room next to the programmer who did not appreciate my presence mainly because I did not know the language. As in the professor’s book, I looked for errors and inconsistences. The programmer assured me that he never made a mistake and told me my client was wasting his money. As I read the program line by line, I thought that something was missing. The programmer told me I was wrong. His program worked perfectly. He brought it up and loaded it. He was right. It worked perfectly.
“Why don’t you pull up the text for the manuscript and let’s go over it line by line together?” I suggested. Giving me a dirty look, he closed his program and pulled up the text we were going to send to the printer. As I read each line to him, all fifty pages, he groaned and muttered, “This is stupid.” As I read the text on the last page, he said, triumphantly, “You missed a line. Without that line, the program won’t load.”
In other words, customers who bought our client’s manual would go through fifty pages of inputting text only to find out toward the end of the manual that the line on how to execute the program was missing.
“Did I?” I said, “Why don’t we go back and check.” He looked at his screen and then he looked at me. “It’s missing in the printer’s copy,” he said.
You will notice, as you read further about adversarial training in Wikipedia, that programmer one may leave a word out or change a word. Programmer two, the adversary, is smart enough to look for inconsistencies and escapes the trap. So, programmer one has to think of a scarier way to trap programmer two. He decides his adversary might be willing to break a rule. So, programmer one describes a new kind of stove, one that is designed so well that, no matter what programmer two cooks on iit, when he touches the cooking area, he won’t get burned.
And we all know what happens next.
If you have a child who does not obey the rules, he just might be able to create code that will out-adversary an adversary and be hired by Palantir. According to the New York Times, Palantir’s revenue has skyrocketed during the Trump administration as it has signed large contracts with the government — including with ICE, for whom its software helps find and track immigrants — and as it has benefited from the artificial intelligence boom.”[1]
Jared Isaacson, the former CEO, dropped out of high school to run a software company with a friend and got two advanced degrees.
On December 18, 2025, he was sworn in as the new head of NASA.
If I had a chance to meet him, I’d want to see if he had any scars on his hands.
[1] Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Dealbook: Here’s What’s Happening,” The New York Times, February 3, 2026; https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/signup/DK