Years ago, scholars (such as Didier Bigo) have already raised concerns about the targeting of individuals merely based on (indirect) association with a "terrorist" or "criminal". Originally used in the context of surveillance (see Snowden revelations), such systems would target anyone who would be e.g. less than 3-steps away from an identified individual, thereby removing any sense of due process or targeted surveillance. Now, such AI systems are being used to actually kill people - instead of just surveil.
IHL actually prohibits the killing of persons who are not combatants or "fighters" of an armed group. Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time. Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc.
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried. Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
Lavender is so scary because it enables Israel's mass targeting of people who are protected against attack by international law, providing a flimsy (political but not legal) justification for their association with terrorists.
It always starts with making a list of targets that meet given criteria. Once you have the list its use changes from categorisation to demonisation -> surveillance -> denial of rights -> deportations -> killing. Early use of computers by Germans during WW2 included making and processing of lists of people who ought to be sent to concentration camps. The only difference today is that we are able to capture more data and process it faster at scale.
There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
One of the reasons for the adoption of the Hollerith Tabulator in the great 1890 Census - arguably the birth of computing in the United States - was the increasing concern about . . let's say ethnics. To be frank, there were too many of them. "Japanese," "Chinese," "Negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon," "negrito", etc etc. So in 1890, we needed dozens of new categories, and the old methods simply would not work. At least in terms of usable - actionable[1] - data in a quantitative setting.
Its success was so marked that it was immediately decided in 1893 to move a Tabulator to Ellis Island, to count the ethnics from the source with Hollerith's new technology. Herman Hollerith had great success in his own lifetime, the technology eventually becoming the core of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, otherwise known, a decade later, as International Business Machines.
The establishment of this clear process surrounding race - actual race law - was, believe it or not, pretty novel in Western history. A lot of old-timey race policy - like the relationship between a monarch and the Jews, or what exactly a visiting Muslim could or couldn't do (like sell and buy slaves cough Venice cough) - this race stuff was almost always very, ah, what we'd call "tribal knowledge". A Jew in the Middle Ages could have far greater rights and lifestyle than in later periods, but those rights were completely unpredictable; this was true to greater or lesser extent for many "outsiders" in the early European era. Even in 1900 American innovation in race law - based on "Science!" - was a new thing, and extremely exciting to the enthusiasts of folk movements[2] crisscrossing our entire civilization[3] at the time. One of those was Willy Heidinger, who established Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft to produce license-built Hollerith machines. World events interceded, however, and the German civil service infrastructure to run a census would not be present until much later . . 1933, in fact, when things would get very spicy indeed in the world of race "science".
And then, of course, cataclysm: the end of the European Order.
On the European continent, a debt to truth was paid. A hundred million dead or maimed, nations wrecked, a whole world - a weltanschauung - burnt down to the foundations - below the foundations. But elsewhere - like in the New World - the lesson was not as stark. And in yet other places the inverse lesson was learned: once you determine a person is not a person, you must brutalize yourself and your population immediately, before the soon-to-be-unpeople realizes that the struggle is existential.
Let's wrap this up.
What 20th century Race Science/Race Law were trying to do was make sense of something as complicated as human culture but using the sciences they understood: 19th century statistics, the physics of iron and steam. Those were the sciences with the capital backing, so - of course! - those were the only science that mattered. Today, we're looking at another complex element of the human experience - human language, human consciousness - and again, we're looking at it through the science that's got the most capital backing it: computation. That's how "text" somehow, incredibly, came to contain "language". Or how "scarcity" was represented by "money" - as if there were any N-dimensional descriptions that could adequately vectorize either of those concepts.
Ultimately, when you really dig yourself into these sorts of artificial - if not downright dishonest - "science-y" establishments, when you start imposing them on the world, you don't break out of them easily. Or without damage. The people making use of your LLM widget do not understand the math - all they know, like the race science of previous centuries - is that it's Science-y. It might as well be wearing a Mitre and Crosier.
[1] What those actions were, is a subject for another post. Probably inside a soon-to-be-flagged topic.
[2] The American example in race law was also very exciting to a certain Mr. Adolf Hitler, as well. You can read all about it in Mein Kampf. Hitler's attitude towards America is really fascinating stuff, but an entirely other subject.
[3] And beyond! Ethnonationalism spread like fire, as colonized peoples realized this could be their big ticket towards peerage in the European age.
> Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc.
There is some incredible magic that often happens: as soon as anyone is targeted and killed, they immediately transform from civilians to "collaborators", "terrorists", "militants" etc. Of course everything is classified and restricted to avoid anyone snooping around and asking questions.
We all know (if we stop and think) that a person can be both a teacher and a terrorist.
But according to media here almost every victim except top Hamas brass seems to be referred to by their whatever else they were besides terrorists and the terrorists (or even just soldier) part get hushed down.
On the flip side, in this war many of the Gaza combatants are either irregular forces or militants deliberately wearing civilian clothing.
So if some guy in a track suit and flip-flops uses an anti tank grenade launcher, discards the empty tube, walks away, and gets lit up, then the next day the Internet is awash with videos of the “IDF murdering a civilian!”
For reference, I think both sides are in the wrong in this conflict, and Israel more than Gaza.
However, the Internet is full of armchair international law experts that are being played like a fiddle by Hamas’ propaganda arm.
Speaking of international laws of combat: no protections apply to non-uniformed combatants pretending to be civilians. None. They can be tortured, executed on the spot, whatever.
If you want protections to apply to you, then wear a uniform or never go anywhere near a gun.
It's also interesting (and I guess typical for end-users of software) how quickly and easily something like this goes from "Here's a tool you can use as an information input when deciding who to target" to "I dunno, computer says these are the people we need to kill, let's get to it".
In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and maybe even what the higher-ups think, but I suspect it's become the latter.
I read that article and feel your interpretation is very misleading/wrong.
The Guardian article makes it clear prior to those denials that those higher-up appear to not to care how accurate it is and appear to be making a conscious choice to accept the fact it is highly flawed on the basis that it might kill some of whom they would legitimately claim as valid targets.
It's clear from the operational details discussed in the article the critical target number is largely number of kills, regardless of whether they are any actual material threat, or not.
Cull predominantly the male population and their family members, not assassinate active threats is the overall impression I got of the Israeli strategy.
I must add that anyone claiming the use of AI and inference models in this way is in anyway justifiable needs to seek help. The claim of 90% accuracy is almost certainly over claiming by over 100%.
By the standards discussed in the article, anyone with a beef with Israel could justify targeting possible a majority of buildings in Israel. After all, most of the population is required to serve in the IDF.
> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers,..
I think the loop-hole here is that a weapon manufacturing facility is almost certainly a military strategic target, and international law allows you to target the infrastructure provided the military advantage gained is porportional to the civilian death.
So you can't target the individuals but according to international law its fine to target the building they are in while the individuals are still inside provided its militarily worth it.
But presumably if you can target the building e.g. at night when nobody is there, that's preferable to targeting it during the day when there may be more civilian workers.
Practical AI did a podcast episode about the dangers of using AI models as a shield to hide behind in justifying your decisions. The episode was titled "Suspicion Machines" and based on the libked article [1], and I think it's worth a read/listen.
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack
It seems wrong that you can't target weapon manufacturers, can you cite a source? Weapon manufacturers contribute to the military action, and destroying weapon manufacturers contributes to military advantage.
You can target the manufacturing plants since they are military objectives but you cannot target the workers. If any war-sustaining activity would make you, as a person, a target, pretty much anyone could be bombed: farmers, bankers, power plant engineers, truck drivers, ...
For a source, you can check out the Red Cross document I linked. Specifically, Ctrl+F for "continuous combat function" and read the commentary on recommendation V. The Guidance is considered authoritative in legal circles.
This is a very 'anti-war' opinion by a lawyer affiliated with the Red Cross, not some sort of treaty or other convention. As an example, the Geneva Convention's scope of protection is much narrower.
That's not exactly a prediction. It was was standard operating procedure for Warsaw Pact nations. They used human intel which was possibly even worse because it could manipulated out of malice.
> Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time.
The problem with Hamas is that they don't shy away from hiding combattants in civilian clothings or use women and children as suicide bombers. There is more than enough evidence of this tactic, dating back many many years [1].
By not just not preventing, but actively ordering such war crimes, Hamas leadership has stripped its civilian population of the protections of international law.
> Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
In regular wars, it's uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers, away from civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, residential areas). The rules of war make deviating from that a war crime on its own, simply because it places the other party in the conflict of either having no chance to wage the war or to commit war crimes on their own.
An entire civilian population cannot be stripped of its protections of international law. This type of dehumanising rhetoric is the exact filth that leads to genocide and other atrocities (as we can see happening live in recent months).
> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried.
In theory, yes. In practice--in which make believe world is this true?
Always interesting to me how western diplomats do not just right out reject bombing of diplomatic buildings, but search for stupid justifications, if it's "others" being bombed and not their team.
Or politicians who don't reject targeting of other politicians' families for killing, when it's the politicians they "don't like" or whatever, and even tacitly support it. Or who don't say a word when a hospital is attacked and hundreds of people murdered in it over several weeks, and ultimately destroyed, but blab something about right to self-defence constantly, or IHL which according to legal experts is used mostly to enable mass murder, not to stop it. Kinda paradoxical for a law that was meant to prevent needless suffering.
It's like all these people have a death wish, because they're setting standards for future wars. And there will be future wars, even in Europe. Anyway, I lost all respect for all the idiot politicians I sadly voted for, who justify day and night the murder of medics, whole families, children, starvation, etc., when it's "the other", and are all up in arms when it's "us". I certainly won't be fighting for any of them, when the war comes here. They have 0 standards. I'll let them die according to their wishes and standards.
I am okay with the notion that war is dirty and that Hamas will try to pretend to be civilians or whatever. I have some questions:
- if the weapons always wait for them at target locations, who is transporting the weapons at any given target location and why is that not the focus?
- if we know they try to use infrastructure like hospitals, the IDF clearly knows where Hamas is aiming to shelter in, why not militarily occupy hospitals but then otherwise allow them to run without delay vs sniping anyone who shows up in a window?
- how is it possible the IDF allowed premature babies to die in their incubators once medical staff left a hospital in Gaza (aka unoccupied facility for IDF to sweep through), such that once medical staff returned they were presented with their rotting bodies left untouched in the incubators?
- how were Israeli unarmed civilians waving white t-shirts get mistaken for armed Hamas combatants and shot dead when trying to escape from their capture?
- how did the World Kitchen convoy, which had provided the IDF their route and time and coordinates with clearly labeled trucks, get shot with targeted missiles from above?
> It is very convenient to criticize it when you're not in it
Israel 'criticised' Hamas for their monstrous attack six months ago, started a war over it. Perhaps you're saying Israel should have just accepted it?
You know, perhaps this whole mess Israel is now involved in is a product of its own behaviour, and killing of loads more Palestinians is not likely to bring peace but further hate and evil.
There seems to be little evidence to your statement “Israel seems to trying much harder to avoid civilian casualties than […]”. All estimates I have seen seem to indicate astonishing rates of civilian casualties, hence why Israel is getting so much criticism of basically indiscriminate killing in Gaza…
Even though you may not be necessarily wrong on how little regard those armies in those previous wars (and indeed all warring parties in those wars to some extent) had for the civilian population, the situation is Gaza is made so much more drastic because there’s already nowhere for the (already displaced for decades) population to go amid all this assault and bombing (not to mention the widespread starving and all those other factors, which combined led to the “genocide” claim levied by some). That’s also a reason why all western countries are trying to dissuade Israel from the Rafat assault.
Also, we have the idea that human beings are supposed to learn from those previous tragedies and do better, and that we’re in a much more civilized, peaceful and prosperous place than before, so it’s likely a disillusion and horror for a lot of people to see such a nightmarish scenario unfolding again in 2023. Some intrinsic parts about human nature and human societies will never change unfortunately.
For as much as the IOF likes to market this expression, I only ever see them do it in the actual sense, like chaining literal 12 year-olds to the front of armored vehicles
It makes sense. Blowing up a military HQ with a clerk in it makes sense. Blowing up a clerk walking on the sidewalk seems like a wasted effort.
You can come up with all sorts of justifications for anything. At the end of the day, time and time again, over the top escalation usually hurts the stronger party. Asymmetrical warfare doesn’t garner sympathy or military advantages to the stronger party.
I don't understand your point here. They are targeting militants with the system:
> Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark by all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.
Never thought I'd even consider this, but is this a case where those involved, producing and developing, this software should be tried for murder/crimes against humanity?
My understanding is that AI in it's current form is not an applicable technology to be anywhere near this type of use.
Again my understanding: Inference models by their very nature are largely non-deterministic, in terms of being able to evaluate accurately against specific desired outcomes. They need large scale training data available to provide even low levels of accuracy. That type of training data just isn't available, its all likely to be based on one big hallucination, is my take. I'd be surprised if this AI model was even 10% accurate. It wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 1% accurate. Not that accuracy appears to be critical from what I've read.
This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open.
Depends on what "AI" means here. There is a spectrum of "we have a bunch of data in a database and some folks hand tuning queries" to "we built a deep learning network to predict XYZ." In the middle of that spectrum lie things like decision trees which provide explainable results.
It's the former, but from what I read in the article, a shady version of that is my take.
The computer basically appeared to randomise a high number of people to kill based on a very shallow dataset, weak data linking and a high desire to kill people who are Palestinian.
It's hard to read the details from the Guardian article and think of it as anything other than a randomised Israeli state murder machine. I can't envisage it being accurate to a point any reasonable person would accept it be used against someone they know, in any circumstances.
That it targeted 10's of thousands is utterly horrifying. That it was involved in any actual battleground scenario makes me think those involved in it's creation and sale are culpable.
It is not a naive take. Not by a long shot. Knowingly working on the development or upkeep of such a system, full well knowing it's limitations, and knowing of it's aftermath obliterates any level of clean hands in my eyes.
It’s amply clear from reporting that the IDF has no formal RoE on the ground - low level commanders have full autonomy to kill whomever, whenever, with zero oversight.
The “AI” exists to retcon the justification for any particular genocidal act, but this is really just an old school mindless slaughter driven by anger and racism.
Sorry. Guns do kill people. That's their whole point.
I know roughly ~1000 people. Maybe 10 of them have the physical capability of killing someone, in case you don't know, it's not actually that easy to do it yourself.
Of those not all could mentally do it under anything but the most extreme of circumstances. 2, maybe 3 might be actually capable of ending a life under extreme circumstances.
With a gun probably, at a guess, ~400 - 700 could kill someone if they got anxious/scared enough is my bet. Even if I'm way off it's a lot more than without a gun. Couple of hundred at least. Not 2, or 3!
So yes, I'm sorry, guns definitely, 100% kill people.
And more people will absolutely kill someone if they possess a gun, than if the didn't. And by extension same is true if AI.
I'm interested how you even come up with that response? It's obviously factually and logically wrong. What makes you think it makes a reasonable argument to anyone?
Also, worth pointing out, thar AI in this case is insanely unfit for it's purpose (unlike a gun) and will have randomly killed lots of innocent people, even if the AI algorithm says otherwise.
I give you a gun and say "shoot whoever you choose with this gun, the choice is yours".
I give you an AI powered gun and say "use this however you choose, I have programmed it to automatically shoot in certain circumstances".
In the latter case, I have some responsibility, because I shared in the decision making by programming the gun. Through my code I have put my proverbial finger on the trigger, right next to your finger.
Said people are trusting the intel from the AI. Those who provide that intel possible should shoulder responsibility for its effects, or at least its efficacy.
this is such BS argument, before guns you could still kill people but it'd take a lot more effort & organization to kill en-masse. same deal if you apply this logic to nukes or missiles. yes those people should be held responsible but there should be a systematic regulation of AI-robot killing machines just like we have geneva accords for cluster munitions or unusually cruel weapons. this is just common sense 101.
Sorry but from an AI system that targets individuals to a system that kills them (they already have autonomous drones with computer vision) there is max 1-2 web services path. So AI kills people
> This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open.
Someone will double down and include AI into the execution phase via AI controlled drones, tanks, etc. Then they will claim no responsibility and blame the ghost-in-the-shell.
As bad as this story makes the Israelis sound, it still reads like ass-covering to make it sound like they were at least trying to kill militants. It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution, with the goal of rendering life in Gaza impossible.
> It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution
I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy. If there was an intentional policy to kills journalists, aid workers and medical staff you'd see a lot more dead.
And you have to be extremely naive or one sided to not realize that Hamas does use those type of roles as cover for their operations.
Not trying to justify Israel's actions because they are fucked up, but based on all the evidence we have you are clearly wrong.
It is. The IDF shot once, then when a vehicle came to rescue survivors, they shot again. Then the third attempt at rescueing survivors, they shot a third time. Purposefully murdering aid workers that coordinated with the IDF before entering the area.
“…were traveling in a convoy that had been coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and was following an IDF-approved route. The vehicles had GPS trackers and SOS beacons broadcasting their positions”
> I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy.
I will try to solve your doubt. Gaza is a closed area. You can't just cross freely the frontier unless Israel allows it. Before that, humanitarian organisations are required to inform directly to Israeli army about everything that they want to do, where they want to go, how many, an when. They are clearly identified by a logo at all times. Israel had every single piece of info necessary to avoid bombing aid workers and had it for weeks
Despite that, Israel can't avoid to keep killing this workers; and they were doing the same repeatedly, systematically, for the last six months, in multiple attacks that last tens of minutes (maybe even hours?), while singing "oops!, I did it again".
The theory of the honest mistake is getting really difficult to swallow.
Yea this really seems like more of a weapon of propaganda directed at Israelis. If they didn't want people to know about it, we probably wouldn't know about it. The fact that we're talking about it is probably not an accident, and I guess the play here would be to convince Israelis that the army is technologically advanced and they know what they're doing, so don't question it. But AI or not they were going to commit genocide and violate every international humanitarian law on the book. But for the people that still believe the genocide is justified I think this probably improves the optics.
I don't know if this was really planned. With my best will, I cannot imagine the Israeli military & Netanyahu's government releasing this to cover their ass. This could be potentially something which worsens their actions and not lessen them.
Obviously, nobody in an international court will be able to say "... but the AI did it!" - This is just far too easy as a way out. There are rules to AI Usage and one of them is not a usage like that - as already said somewhere else: The AI is only as ethical/moral as the humans behind them.
I'm disturbed by the idea that an AI could be used to make decisions that could proactively kill someone. (Presumably computer already make decisions that passively kill people by, for example, navigating a self-driving car.) Though there was a human sign-off in this case, it seems one step away from people being killed by robots with zero human intervention which is about one step away from the plot of Terminator.
I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. I know very little about military strategy-- without the AI would Israel have been picking targets less, or more haphazardly? I think there may be some mis-reading of this article where people imagine that if Israel weren't using an AI they wouldn't drop any bombs at all, that's clearly unlikely given that there's a war on. Obviously people, including innocents, are killed in war, which is why we all loathe war and pray for the current one to end as quickly as possible.
> B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
> “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.```
So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions.
This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.
I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.
But to my point:
> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.
To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
I imagine you get to tune the probability window of "person is >90% likely a Hamas terrorist" and choose how many innocent people you kill. Who set the window?
"Hamas terrorist" criteria: a male of fighting age, give higher weight to those congregating with others of fighting age. Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set. Lovely.
>This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Reminds me of similar industrial thinking of a certain previous fascist government.
I don’t like Lavender. I think humans should always be in the loop. I’d like to see more care by analysts for kill orders.
That said, any organization might do something if it’s 90% accurate. Assuming it even is (doubt it), I think any fair evaluation of such a technology must ask:
What is the accuracy of inexperienced humans in the same position who are rushing through the review during a blitz invasion? If they have battle experience, what about them, too? (I’m assuming most won’t.)
Is the system better than those humans or worse? How often?
Do the strengths and weaknesses of the system allow confidence scores on predictions to know which need more review? Can we also increase reviews when the number of deaths will be high?
That’s how I’d start a review of this tech. If anyone is building military AI, I also ask that you please include methods to highlight likely corner cases or high-stakes situations. Then, someone’s human instincts might kick in where they spot and resolve a problem even in the heat of war.
It is very clear to me that that is a sentence reflecting the editorial interpretation of the paper rather than a direct quote. You might agree with the interpretation - I think I might - but that is very different from this specific sentiment being something Israeli leadership are openly saying.
90% is a BS number . Computed basis what ? What is the baseline how did they benchmark . Is there any data whatsoever to back this claim ?
They just spout a high number that is not 100% (clearly civilians are being killed publicly undeniably ) claiming 100% would be too obviously ridiculous.
More than half of 32,000+ (more under the rubble) killed are woman and children, Hamas is still quite able to fight, hardly any hostages has been recovered .
Israel labels any sort of civilian organization as hamas including journalists, medical and aid staff. 200 UN staff and 100 journalists are dead so far . Israel’s argument is UNWRA terrorist aiding and journalists were also secretly Hamas and doing non journalistic stuff when killed so they include them in legitimate targets .
If you consider everyone is Hamas unless otherwise proven then 90% is possible .
There is no realistic way an algorithm was designed factoring in the level of destruction of infrastructure never seen in any real world data and also benchmarked accurately.
> I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
It seems obvious to me that the alternative would be a slower process for picking targets leading to fewer overall targets picked and the guarantee that a human conscience is involved in the process.
Or alternatively pressure from the top down on targeting specialists to get more and more targets selected resulting in less quality and effort spent on selecting targets and maybe leading to rubber-stamping proposed targets without adequate consideration. Which isn't to suggest that that would definitely make the AI better per se
Look I know this is gonna sound cliche but the thing they should do is not engage in an offensive asymmetrical war and bomb a dense urban area full of innocents for basically no reason. Then they wouldn’t need the little ai.
This is obviously veering way off course of the topic of AI at this point, but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason." I'm interested in analysis and criticism of Israel's use of AI in this case but suggesting Israel has no causus belli is absurd.
Disturbing indeed. I've been worried a push back in AI is coming and this sort of story could be a tipping point and certainly would justify a period of reflection.
And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't capture the publics attention like a sky-net doomsday happening over the civilians in Gaza.
there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless
I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
I would strongly argue that even being able to prove that a human might perform worse is not an acceptable excuse for the reasons I will outline. The bar for a computer needs to be significally higher than that of a human.
We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.
Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.
Pushback on AI will of course have a “National security” exception. If the industrial level facial recognition tech in Xinjiang was forgotten I doubt this will make a difference
>I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think that once you start from the viewpoint that you're not going to create the Torment Nexus, it becomes a lot easier to avoid creating the Torment Nexus.
A lot of news around the bombing called out the uniquely large scale and rapidity of the campaign.
This was a preview of future conflicts.
We're entering the WWI phase of new technology being brought without rules to conflicts where the abuses will be horrific until rules are finally put in place.
We crossed the line of machines that automatically kill a long time ago. A heat seeking missile, or a shell that detects and target tanks [1] are effectively doing that. Software selects the target. The soldier only points in the general direction. AI is only a small technical increment.
This system bassicaly just gave everyone a score from 1 to 100 of how luckely they are part the military wing of hamas.
Another system would signal that target is at home and it's time to bomb. This system was using phone to geo-locate and due to nature of living in Gaza phones transfer hands often.
Without Lavender they would have dropped less bombs IMO.
Is having a human make those decisions really better? It was humans who ordered the Holocaust, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, Tiananmen, etc.
At least AI pretends to look at some data instead of just defaulting to tribal bloodlust... who's to say it can't be more ethical? It doesn't take much to beat our track record.
I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
Reminds me of that story from probably 5-7y ago. Someone wanted to use AI to classify photos of tanks as soviet vs US. So he went to a US tank museum and took lots of pictures of the tanks under every angle. Did the same in a soviet tank museum. The resulting model worked great on that training dataset. Then he tried on photos outside of the training dataset. Turned out that it was cloudy the day he visited the US museum and sunny for the soviet museum, and the model used the color of the sky to classify.
I'm having to take a few deep breaths before responding to some of these comments. The difference is Accountability. A computer can't be held accountable and a person can. Full stop. It makes all the difference.
when a computer program designed by a human "makes" the decision, humans can claim that it was "a funny mistake", it was not their fault and pretend to be very sad for it.
Having a human to make those decisions is better because this human can be judged if commits war crimes or genocide or violates international war laws.
A computer can't be jailed and this is the real power of designing this system. To hide the criminals on a black box so nobody can be made responsible
I know many people won't read past the headline, but please try to.
This is the second paragraph:
"In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."
in the article they say it's explicit and it's 20 to 1 and goes to 100 to 1 for some targets. which makes it obvious it's not a rule but an order of magnitude to estimate the importance of a target. you know like when we use the Fibonacci suite as a measure for the difficulty of a backlog item during the planning game
The whole point of this article (and much of what we've learned in the last few months) is that Israel is clearly not just targeting areas with suspected Hamas activity.
They're using indiscriminate weapons (so not targeting at all!), hitting known UN and humanitarian sites, and killing so ruthlessly that they killed Israeli hostages that made the mistake of being living humans in front of IDF soldiers.
They permitted larger numbers of civilians being killed in the pursuit of terrorist barbarics who raped and murdered and dragged babies with their mothers into underground dungeons, and praised themselves for that while hiding between civilians.
I suggest everyone listen to the current season of the Serial podcast.
>processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
This is really no different than how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo and other more secretive prisons, or bombing their location
More than anything else it feels like just like in the corporate world, the engineers in the army are overselling the AI buzzword to do exactly what they were doing before it existed
If you use your paypal account to send money to an account identified as ISIS, you're going to get a visit from a 3 letter organization really quick. This sounds exactly like that from what the users are testifying to. Any decision to bomb or not bomb a location wasn't up to the AI, but to humans
Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway were heavily involved in the war on terror. Bombing Afghanistan but also arresting "suspected" people of their own
> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
Watching i24 news is a little unsettling. They run bits with interrogators announcing how productive torture has been, and make jokes about how it would be much easier if lemons just gave up their juice without being squeezed.
I've seen a few clips on Twitter, and it's some of the most disgusting footage I've ever seen in my life - torture, murder and genocide made into light entertainment for Israelis. It's just... unspeakably vile.
There are ~2M civilians who live in Gaza, and many of them don't have access to food, water, medicine, or safe shelter. Some of those unfortunates live above, or below, Hamas operatives and their families.
"Oh, sorry, lol." "It was unintentional, lmao, seriously." "Our doctrine states that we can kill X civilians for every hostile operative, so don't worry about it."
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine -- where Ukrainian and Russian villagers can move away from the front, either towards Russia or westwards into Galicia -- and where nobody's flattening major population centers. In Gaza, anybody can evidently be killed at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. The Israeli "strategy" makes the Ukrainians and Russians look like paragons of restraint and civility.
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine because Hamas does not issue uniforms or clearly demarcate military targets.
When the US was in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda learned that the US (generally) won't shoot ambulances. So what became the most valuable vehicle to Al Qaeda? Hamas took notes, but Israel doesn't seem to care as much as the US.
Also, besides all that, once something is used for military operations, it is fair game as a military target. Regardless of civilians. When the law was written it was assumed that governments wouldn't intentionally use their civilians as protection.
Because it's Israel. It's also why no western country has ever really officially condemned Israel no matter what they do. They are on "our side" so it's okay. And those civilians kind of deserved it anyways or something, and we can just trust every single word the IDF says and use them as an actual source to pretend the IDF isn't into mass civilian murder.
The only thing that made this time a bit different is the crazy, almost hard to believe, switch from the Ukrainian conflict and how it was seen and portrayed... To western countries staying completely silent when again, it's our side doing it. Well it wasn't hard to believe but it just made it a lot more blatant.
Israel doesn't really care though since israeli officers routinely go on public tirades that amount to mask-off allusions to genocide ("wipe Gaza" "level the city to the ground" "make it unliveable"), with again 0 consequences at all. Even Russia at least tries to not have Russian military officers just say the quiet part out loud.
Isn’t a military person a legitimate target at the time of the war? I think it is, the issue is the collateral damage. But then again this war shows that Hamas is also not following the rules and gets too close to civilians.
I wonder how accurate this technology really is or if they care so little for the results and instead more for the optics of being seen as advanced. On one hand, it’s scary to think this technology exists but on the other, it might just be a pile of junk since the output is so biased. What’s even scarier is that it’s proof that people in power don’t care about “correct”, they care about having a justification to confirm their biases. It’s always been the case but it’s even more damming this extends to AI. Previously, you were limited by how many humans can lie but now you’re limited by how fast your magic black box runs.
It's unconfirmed who authorized it but the recent food charity workers killed by Israeli bombing had a security person (death confirmed by family in UK) who is unarmed but by job description clears the way by telling Israeli authorities where the charity team is going to be so the chain of command knew who they were, so one is naturally lead to ask - who would authorize a targeted killing in this situation? The after photos show the missile went right through the roof of the car, ironically next to the food charity's visible logo on top of the car. Israeli defense minister now claims it was a mistake, although if they had hit a real target it might have been acceptable in terms of their rules of engagement with 15-100 unrelated collateral deaths according to the investigation.
> With unintended strikes, there's "we work hard to avoid this, but based on bad intel made a rare, tragic error," and "we've encouraged RoE that foreseeably makes tragic errors frequent, but this looks bad and in hindsight wish we hadn't done it."
> Israel's strike on WCK food aid workers is the latter
Israel has long had pretty plain issues with its rules of engagement. Recall that earlier in this conflict, the IDF shot three of the hostages whose recovery is one of the main goals of the operation!
War zones aren't as quiet and organized as you would imagine. More so when one side is disguised as regular civilians. All war zones also have people killed by friendly fire. I would assume friendly fire > killing western charity workers > killing civilians in order of importance to the military
Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens
I think optics of being advanced aren't the main goal. Some form of "justification", no matter how flimsy, especially if it's hard to audit how the "AI" came to it's conclusions, is the goal. Now anyone is a target. Similar to cops in the US "smelling weed" or dogs "signaling". It provides the means to justify any search, or in this case, any kill. The machine grinds away..
In 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, SVP Diane Greene, SVP Urs Hölzle, and top engineer Jeff Dean built a system like Lavender for the US military (Project Maven). The US military planned to use it to analyze mass-surveillance drone footage to pick suspects in Pakistan for assassination. They had already dropped bombs on hundreds of houses and vehicles, murdering thousands of suspects and their families and friends [0].
I was working in Urs's Google Technical Infrastructure division. I read about the project in the news. Urs had a meeting about it where he lied to us, saying the contract was only $9M. It had already been expanded to $18M and was on track for $270M. He and Jeff Dean tried to downplay the impact of their work. Jeff Dean blinked constantly (lying?) while downplaying the impact. He suddenly stopped blinking when he began to talk about the technical aspects. I instantly lost all respect for him and the company's leadership.
Strong abilities in engineering and business often do not come with well-developed morals. Sadly, our society is not structured to ensure that leaders have necessary moral education, or remove them when they fail so completely at moral decisions.
And, personally, I think that stories like this are of public interest - while I won’t ask for it directly, I hope the flag is removed and the discussion can happen.
The feeling I got during the last months here when there are articles about this war is, that there are either many Israelis here flagging anything that makes Israel look bad, or many Americans, who somehow feel allegiance to Israel and think that this ever was about a good cause.
On the other hand of course there are also those that jump on any claim that makes Israel look bad. Claims of which there are many. Of which far too many have become pretty evident. Which far too many people do not want to be true and will ignore.
So what can one do? I guess keep an open mind and give claims a couple of days to be proven or disproven. Only then judge.
The difference between previously revealed 'Gospel' and this 'Lavender' is revealed here:
> "The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list."
It's one thing to use these systems to mine data on human populations for who might be in the market for a new laptop, so they can be targeted with advertisements - it's quite different to target people with bombs and drones based on this technology.
Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
I would argue that it's likely the only outcome it has had that directly relates to IDF objectives has probably been negative (i.e. the unintended killing of hostages).
Sadly, I think that the continued use of this AI is supported because it is helping to provide cover for individuals involved in war crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI really weren't very sophisticated at all and that to serve the purpose of cover that doesn't matter.
I'm starting to get convinced the stated objective isn't the objective IDF is really after.
They say the objective is to destroy Hamas and save the hostages.
I think the actual objective is to murder as many palestinians as possible. At the very least that is the actual objective of some IDF soldiers. They've said as much publicly.
Whether or not that's the actual objective intentionally or unintentionally is just arguing semantics at this point.
> Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
Their invasion of the Gaza city went way better than expected by most analysts, with minimal casualties among Israeli. So probably? Hard to compare with the alternative reality where they select the targets the old way.
That their stated objectives are likely unachievable is a different issue.
Politically and diplomatically, it could be argued Hamas have been considerably strengthened. They certainly think so.
It seems to me that Israel's overall position - politically, diplomatically, and in terms of physical security - has become much worse since the October 7 attack and it has been their own actions that are responsible for the change. A different response should have seen them politically and diplomatically strengthened.
I understand the emotive reasons for not doing so, but I think most people would consider that Israel has bungled their response to October 7.
I would call this attack on Gaza a total failure. If nothing else a failure of humanity.
It's looking more and more like the 'winners' in this situation are Hamas and the losers are the Israeli government, the US government, and the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Just a day or two ago there was another IDF raid on Shifa hospital.
Months ago the IDF claims that Hamas is operating out of tunnels under the hospital, they raid the hospital. A few weeks later, they raid the hospital again, and again, and again, up until this recent raid some days ago.
You claim Hamas is diminished, but how diminished can they really be if they keep popping up in the same predictable place over and over and over? In North Gaza, the place the IDF has been fighting to secure for the longest, Hamas just pops up one day in the same place they have many times before and so they have to raid the hospital again.
This is all according to Israel's own claims. If Israel's claims are true, then Hamas is one of those mystical enemies that pops up everywhere and is super strong and justifies all sorts of things to defeat, while also being weak and "diminished".
I think the truth is that Israel wants to destroy the health system in Gaza and drive the people out. Shifa hospital is basically rubble at this point.
I think they're real objectives are to murder as many Palestinians as possible, and to occupy the north of the Gaza strip. Why? Two reasons: oil & gas, and beach-front real estate. Israel has already dished out licenses to oil producers for fields in Palestinian waters, and the new "aid" pier the US is building for them is rather suspect.
Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
The law of armed conflict acknowledges that civilian deaths are inevitable, and only prohibits attacks that are directed at civilians; rather than those which are directed at combatants with expected civilian casualties as collateral damage.
The legal question is whether the civilian casualties are proportional to the concrete military value of the target.
A question that's worth considering is whether, when considering proportionality, all civilians (as defined by law) are made equal in a moral sense.
For example, the category "civilian" includes munitions workers or those otherwise offering support to combatants on the one hand, and young children on the other. It also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.
The law of armed conflict doesn't distinguish these; albeit that I think people might well distinguish, on a moral level, between casualties amongst young children, munitions workers, and informal combatants.
> For example, the category "civilian" includes munitions workers or those otherwise offering support to combatants on the one hand, and young children on the other. It also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.
I wonder if you would say the same on the other side where every male or female above 18 years is required to serve in thr military and in the reserve afterwards? [1]
By your argument would you say that all of these are legitimate targets?
Except that Israel has no business engaging in armed conflict or "war" on a territory they occupy and control. That's the only legal issue that matters. Any armed conduct by Israel in Gaza is by international definition deemed ILLEGAL. There's no right of self defense when you're the predator.
"Our system is 90% accurate if you don't count the 15-20 innocent people taken out for each hit". I know they're measuring the accuracy of target identification but that's laughable when used in this context.
For 100 targets, 90 are 'correct', plus 20x civs per-target is 90/2100 or 4% real accuracy.
Say you use a model that's only 50% accurate and limit yourself to 10 civs per-target, you're at 50/1100 or 4.5% accuracy!
I guess my point is that no self-respecting datascient would release a 50% accurate model, let alone one used to make life or death decisions and yet, in the application of this model, decisions made by humans about its use has made it no better than doing exactly that.
These kinds of accurate numbers of acceptably killed innocents is really hurting a specific part of my sympathy brain somehow.
"we really need to missile this guy or he will kill more" vs "well we got 37 badies and also kim and yashonda, damn i really liked yashonda"
Actually after writing this my mind went farther, "since yashonda was a good person we actually have a whole bunch of hard facts about how good a person she actually was, did a lot of help for her community and was a real pillar of helping the next generation of kids be less violent...too bad we didn't add any of that info into the kill-algorithm "
It doesn't matter if they used dumb or smart bombs to destroy the target. When their selected target entered the building then the whole building became the target by extension. Smart bomb would have equally destroyed the building. Important comparison between dumb and smart bomb is only the probability to hit the target (the building) and IDF used precise diving maneuvers with dumb bombs and avoided hitting high rises with dumb bombs, making the probabilities close. That is not the issue here.
The main crux of the story is the automated target acquisition and the policy to engage the target in civilian homes - there are intelligence errors and collateral damage.
The questions are: is the intelligence gathering and decision making ethical and is the accepted collateral damage ratio reasonable given the scale.
This is different from for example Russian strategy to target whole neighborhoods to inflict terror in the civilian population by indiscriminate killings.
The West can stop it in a moment by imposing the same sanctions as it imposed on Russia. Or in a day, if it imposes that same sanctions that Iran or North Korea are subject to.
Instead the West keeps supplying Israel with weapons and munitions.
This is a typical phenomenon when a topic is divisive, and the Israel/Gaza topic is one of the most divisive.
Edit: We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and also has at least some chance of providing a substantive basis for discussion. I haven't read the current article yet but it seems like a reasonable candidate for this, so I turned off the flags.
For anyone who wants more information about how we approach doing that, in the context of the current topic, here are some past explanations:
Seeing as these discussions are always insta-flagged and you need to revive them to allow for discussion, have you considered adding 'Israel' and 'Palestine to a set of keywords you need to approve to be set as flagged instead of letting automation take over?
Having a human in the loop prevents bad-faith actors from abusing the system to suppress information and discussions.
As someone who sees both sides of this, and as someone who didn't understand this for some time, it's important to understand that one reason a story is likely to get flagged is because users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion. It doesn't mean it's a bad story, or even unworthy of discussion, but many types of stories seem to, pretty predictably, lead to a cesspool of comments where it's clear most folks have no desire to listen to opposing points of view.
FWIW, I found this to be a really interesting story that I didn't previously know about, so I hope it stays up, and this is a story I'd be willing to vouch for.
>it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion.
I guess all you have to do, if you want to suppress information about something, is to ensure that its comments always devolve into unproductive discussions. Funny, I once read about this as a tactic for controlling information flow in online communities...
flagging is voting to censor a particular view. it could have legit uses like spam or toxic comments but just as easy to censor narratives that isn't aligned or clashes with the voter's
im not sure what other tools exist other than a block button like X
There is a system in place for flagging specific comments by users.
Admins can, and do, prune entire branches of comments off of posts.
These two methods would take a bit more work than just banishing the topic entirely, but with topics like the first time that "AI" kill lists are publicized, maybe exceptions should be made.
If one don't want to engage, the hide button isn't too far from the flag button. It's important that people have the option to speak freely and openly about this topic, since so many places shut down any conversation that shows sympathy for Palestinians and/or doesn't paint Israel as unequivocally morally good. This is one of the reasons Israel has been able to get away with this behavior for so long.
Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.
Yeah, you'd hope that a higher level conversation about the use of technology in war, pros/cons, etc could supersede personal political beliefs about this particular conflict. We don't need people's moral judgements on who is right or wrong in this particular case but it would be neat to hear people's thoughts on utilizing information technology as a weapon of war.
I don't take any issue with people flagging a post, so long as an actual person makes the ultimate decision on whether to keep it up.
This is in contrast to how I feel about a statistical model flagging people to be murdered. That's not even remotely OK, even if the decision to actually carry out the murder ultimately goes through a person. Using a statistical model to choose targets is incredibly naive, and practically guarantees that perverse incentives will drive decision-making.
Not in this instance, I assume. People flagging too much can result in shadowbanning, but perhaps the mods think that flagging posts that might host heated political-religious discussion is ok (even if they don't have such discussion, and even if they are on-topic for HN).
I also don't think there is a way to complain about abusing flags other than emailing the mods; I have no clue about the effectiveness of this complaint.
"zero-error policy" as described here is a remarkable euphemism. You might hope that the policy is not to make any errors. In fact the policy is not to acknowledge that errors can occur!
They're great because the accountability for fuckups goes on the system, not on the people using the system. "Oops, the system had a bug" doesn't kill careers like "Oops, I made a bad call."
Such things have been around for at least a decade. It didn't start with the same kind of AI that's being talked about recently, but there is a large automated scoring component: "Targets are often chosen based on metadata."
I don't know about kill lists, but AI weapons kinda make sense.
No weapons are nice, but if the good guys don't develop AI weapons, the bad guys will.
From what I gather, many US engineers are morally opposed to them. But if China develops them and gets into a war with the US, will Americans be happy to lose knowing that they have the moral high ground?
This assumes that AI based weaponry provides value. The case in point here is showing that the only value it provides is a flimsy justification for civilian casualties. We... Don't need more of that in the US, nor would it provide a "good guy" any legitimate value.
It seems unlikely based on what has been revealed about the system. It seems like Lavender is a classification AI that plugs static details about a person into a NN of some sort and spits out a score of how likely they're to be involved with Hamas. Score above a certain threshold and your home becomes a target for a dumb bomb.
The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.
Morally it doesn't up the ante of course, they are already well into a genocide. But optically killing westerners, especially when they are clearly doing aid and you can't throw "they terrorist" shade on it. The World Central Kitchen incident has increased the strength of the platitudes coming from other countries. But not seeing any arms or trade sanctions yet, and no "pausing of funds while we investigate" type stuff reserved for anyone supporting Gaza people.
May have been involved, but I believe in that case there was an explicit human decision made after referring to a senior. I recall somebody quoting an official to this effect.
Getting all these reports about atrocities, I wonder if the conflict in the area has grown more brutal over the decades or if this is just business as usual. I'm in my late 30s, growing up in the EU, the conflict in the region was always present. I don't remember hearing the kind of stories that come to light these days though, indiscriminate killings, food and water being targeted, aid workers being killed. I get that it's hard to know what's real and what's not and that we live in the age of information, but I'm curious how, on a high level, the conflict is developing. Does anyone got a good source that deals with that?
When the US dropped napalm indecriminately over the vietnamese jungle or absolutely leveled dresden in one bombing run or unleashed nuclear hellfire over japan, they probably killed a lot of journalists and doctors and food workers as well. Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time. Its easy to get cynical about it all seeing how easily narratives are manufactured and controlled to serve political ends.
> Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time
Western mainstream media has been very passive when covering the current situation in gaza, especially when you contrast it with how they covered the war in ukraine just 2 yrs ago. Its just that social media has allowed people to break through the canned media narratives.
I believe the bombing of Dresden was controversial and elicited pushback in the media, though it's not surprising that reactions may have been muted given the apocalyptic nature of the war.
The use of napalm in Vietnam triggered widespread protests.
Most of the mainstream media has historically glossed over the atrocities, but it is impossible to ignore them today because of what we see live on the scene thanks to smaller outlets having a broader reach and social media.
It's mostly business as usual. The technology makes the brutality more efficient, though:
Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
...
By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
The interesting thing about how this conflict is developing is that this story is full of quotes from Israeli intelligence. Most plainly say what they're doing. Western outlets may put a positive spin on it (because our governments generally support Israel), but the Israeli military themselves are making their intentions clear: https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-minister-admits-military-carr...
The weaponisation of online media for manipulating the perception of global audiences about the conflict, has definitely ramped up recently. For example, the official Twitter account of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted videos of muslim preachers appearing to denounce lgbt culture during public service in Palestinian mosques. Hamas themselves are denying their involvement in the 2023 massacre and accusing Israel of staging the graphic footage that was disseminated. This greatly polarises the debates on social media and it’s much more common now to see people who are deeply invested emotionally in the narrative of either side.
Who was beheaded? The "40 beheaded babies" turned out to be a lie. The people burnt alive on October 7th were likely from the IDF firing tank shells at homes. Many of them turned out to be Palestinian once forensics were done. Not one of the rape claims seems to be substantiated by any physical evidence and when an Israeli journalist called all the hospitals, morgues, and trauma hotlines they found the number of reported rape victims was zero. At least here in the US the media were happy to report these lies (you know, the kind of shocking and dehumanizing lies that are always used to ramp up a genocide) and then very muted in any kind of correction.
They've proven a lack of interest in the hostages. They've actively refused deals that involved the return of the hostages, and repeatedly carried out operations that put the hostages in danger.
How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
And if it is behind the strategy of starvation as a tool of war, is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
How far does the AI system go?
Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!”
There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
> How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck. I don't think bigger strategic decisions like starving the population of Gaza was bottlenecked in the same way as finding/deciding on bombing targets is.
> is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
It would seem like this program gives whoever is responsible for the actual bombing a list of targets to chose from, so supposedly a human was behind that decision but aided by a computer. Then it turns out (according to the article at least) that the responsible parties mostly rubberstamped those lists without further verification.
> can an AI commit a war crime?
No, war crimes are about making individuals responsible for their choices, not about making programs responsible for their output. At least currently.
The users/makers of the AI surely could be held in violation of laws of war though, depending on what they are doing/did.
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck.
There is also another AI system that tracks when these target get home.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
I think "assassination" colloquially means to pinpoint and kill one individual target. I don't mean to say you are implying this, but I do want to make it clear to other readers that according to the article, they are going for max collateral damage, in terms of human life and infrastructure.
“The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
> Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!”
It's not that the "AI" described here is an autonomous actor.
> During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
Obviously all this is to be taken with a grain of salt, who knows if it's even true.
"An AI" doesn't exist. What is being labeled "AI" here is a statistical model. A model can't do anything; it can only be used to sift data.
No matter where in the chain of actions you put a model, you can't offset human responsibility to that model. If you try, reasonable people will (hopefully) call you out on your bullshit.
> There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
The death machine here is Israel's military. That's a group of people who don't get to hide behind the facade of "an AI told me". It's a group of people who need to be held responsible for naively using a statistical model to choose who they murder next.
The use of AI and the authorisation to kill civilians are unrelated parts of this story. Nowhere does it mention that the AI is being used to justify killing of civilians.
Really? I guess they're just "following orders" from the AI then. What a shameful response, if Russia did this or if the roles were reversed you'd be appalled.
@dang Please consider that this is an important and well sourced article regarding military use of AI and machine learning and shouldn't disappear because some users find it upsetting.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to hear it.
There are more comments like this from him, you can find them using Algolia.
HN is not acting in bad faith whatsoever.
This story in particular “qualifies” for what would be interesting to HN readers while taking into account the sensitivity of the subject.
I fully expect the discussion to be allowed and the flag lifted, but HN mod team is very small and it might take a while - it quite literally always does.
> It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
> Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
In the case of Al Qaeda, that might actually have been true? I don't think you can really compare Hamas to Al Qaeda; almost everything meaningful is different.
here's another story today from France24 about the over-reliance on AI driven targetting may have been responsible for the airstrike on April 1st 2024 that killed seven aid workers in Gaza [0]
As someone working in the AI field, I find this use of AI truly terrifying. Today it may be used to target Hamas and accept a relatively large number of civilian deaths as permissible collateral damage, but nothing guarantees that it won't be exported and used somewhere else. On top of that, I don't think anything is done to alleviate biases in the data (if you're used to target people from a certain group then your AI system will still target people from that group) or validate the predictions after a "target" is bombed. I wish there was more regulations for these use cases. Too bad the EU AI Act doesn't address military uses at all.
I think anyone that works in the AI field is going to really need to have their head on straight to even be able to just emotionally deal with things like this and who knows what else to come.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to just like the idea of AI, study, get a job writing some Python, then one day wake up and learn you have quite a lot of blood (indirectly) on your hands.
Like either you need to become the kind of person that doesn't care, or one that learns to live with a lot of ambient guilt hanging around. Not sure which is worse.
Honestly feel so much for the ten thousand bright eyed, intelligent nerds eager for technology and the future. I know they will be compensated well, but that won't ever balance out what will happen to their minds one way or another.
Given we don’t know what it’s using to identify people we don’t really know any biases. “Holding a military weapon” probably doesn’t contain a whole lot of bias (of course there is misidentification).
> Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
It literally says that they use data from known Hamas members (we don't know what this data contains) as training data which is a recipe for making biased predictions. Hamas members represent a minority in Gaza (the total population is over 2 million people) and thus the real data is heavily imbalanced[0] and unless addressed leads to bad models.
On top of that, if you know anything about Machine Learning then you should be aware of models finding spurious correlations[1] in the data that make its predictions accurate on the available training and validation data and not so much once deployed and used with real data.
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing [...]
Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless. People get bored, are under time pressure, don't find enough mistakes etc and just don't do the review job they're supposed to do anymore.
Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.
I mean at the end of the day an AI being rubber stamped or a human being rubber stamping "minor intel" for a drone strike its still bullshit.
But blaming AI is just easier than acknoledging at every step of this theres a human being Oking it, the war is Ok'd by a human, the target list is ok'd by a human, the missle launch/bomb drop is ok'd by a human, the fucking trigger is pulled by a human.
But sure because the target list was vetted by an AI its the AI's fault.
As a backer on the original Oculus kickstarter, I have such a sinking feeling in my stomach every time this comes up. My money went to enable Luckey to achieve this and I hate myself for it.
Genocide seems like a bit a stretch, but it is hard to tell. I would like to think that Israel is incapable of genocide, but at the very least it's clear they don't mind killing thousands of innocent people. Israel has done some truly inexcusable, horrific things.
I do sympathize with Israel. Israel is surrounded by countries that would like to see it wiped off of the map. Hamas has been attacking Israel from Palestinian territory for two decades. I'm glad that Israel exists and that the Jewish people have a home.
I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be a right answer, but Israel could at least show that it values human life.
Continuously throw enough plot twists and general stimulation at people and they'll never have the time to consider whether they're living in a simulation.
Is the same system used to direct bombing in Lebanon against Hezbollah?
If so it's worth noting that we have much better data on that campaign. We know exactly how many Hezbollah members have died because that organization actually releases that information. We have good numbers on civilian casualties. Naturally there are many different factors but I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties. There have been some notable incidents like IIRC journalists getting hit, but the overall numbers I think are significantly weighed towards military targets.
> I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties.
I wouldn't give them credit. It's a very different environment and that alone is enough to explain fewer civilian deaths. Even if they cared exactly as much as they do about Gazan civilians they would be killing fewer civilians as a proportion.
Reporting from al-Habbariyeh, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said young men were killed in the Israeli strikes that “totally destroyed” the emergency health centre.
...
Khodr reported: “This is not the first time a health centre has been hit in the ongoing confrontations along the border. We’ve seen numerous attacks against health centres especially in front-line villages and we have seen paramedics killed.”
The capacity for computers to make errors has now far exceeded that of tequila and handguns.
I'm sorry. This is so terrible that humor is the only recourse left to me. We were once afraid of AI drones with guns murdering the wrong people, but now we have an AI that is being used to plan a systematic bombing campaign. Human pilots and all the associated support personal are its tools and liberal quotas have been set on how many of the wrong people are permissible for each strike to hit. Yet again, reality has surpassed science fiction nightmare.
A much more concise list could be made of members of Congress that don't want to send money towards offensive weapons in Israel.
It's a vanishingly small list. Virtually everyone wearing a (D) or (R) hat is extremely interested in sending our tax money towards this purpose, which fund programs exactly like in this article.
The name of Lavender makes this so surreal to me for some reason. I'm of the opinion that algorithms shouldn't determine who lives and dies, but it's so common even outside of war.
The code names for secret operations can be dead on or funny at times. I remember a few being emoji’s. It’s only a matter of time until USA or other allied countries secrets are released for using AI enhanced information.
How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?
I think the algorithm, in this case, makes a suggestion and then a human evaluates it. The article claims they've only looked at the sex of the target (kill if male) but also claims 90% effectiveness. I'm curious if 90% is a good number or not? War will always have collateral damages but if technology can help limit that beyond what only a human could do then I'd say it's a net positive. I think the massive efficiencies the algorithm brings to picking targets is a bit frightening (nowhere to run or hide now) but there's no real turning back.
People thought this way about the machine gun, the armored tank, the atom bomb. But once the genie is out there's no putting it back in.
As an aside, I think this is a good example of how humans and AI will work together to bring efficiency to whatever tasks need to be accomplished. There's a lot of fear of AI taking jobs, but I think it was Peter Thiel who said years ago that future AI would work side by side humans to accomplish tasks. Here we are.
>During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION"
it's sort of irrelevant if some shitty computer system is killing people - the people who need to be arrested are the people who allowed the shitty computer system to do that. we obviously cannot allow "oh, not my fault I chose to allow a computer to kill people" to be an excuse or a defence for murder or manslaughter or ... anything.
I don’t want to talk about the war — mostly, I don’t know about the history enough to discuss it. But I want to talk about the use of technology with the intention to exterminate life. AI shows great promises to humanity, but can also extinguish it if misused.
Thousands of years ago, gunpowder was invented. This technology enabled humans to finally break through mountains and build tunnels. It enabled the beautiful display of fireworks. But the misuse of this technology ultimately leads to destructions of cultures and civilizations.
This latest development with AI as implemented in Lavender — is one that’s exceptionally dangerous. This latest misuse of technology should concern all.
We must not allow the proliferation of this brilliant technology to be used for the purpose of destruction. It concerns me greatly.
I hope that we could resolve conflicts and differences in ways that are civil.
The sad and simple truth (trying to not sound political, but it's pretty damned hard given the context) is that it seems that not so long ago, lists and very flimsy justifications were at the root of a lot of pain and suffering for the very people perpetrating the same.
Apart from all the horribleness and knowingly mudering civilians the idea of a 9to5 soldier that performs military activity then goes home to his family, well within range of weapons and intelligence of the enemy and expecting he and his family will be safe there while he sleeps is a bit insane. I can't imagine any army hellbent on winning fast would pass up on that opportunity.
USA didn't exactly have much stricter conditions or way better accurancy of their intelligence. They did nothing qualitatively different. They just labeled anyone in the blast radious as unknown enemy combatants in the reports. And USA never had to operate at this volume. I guess that's just how modern war looks from the position of superior firepower.
Yes. That's terrible. It also proves that they are not interested in the accuracy of their precious military software. They can't make it more accurate without feedback. So the accurancy is not the goal. The goal is to have an excuse for the killing.
Monstrous. From some of the quotes alone, let alone the numbers, it's clear that Palestinian lives matter about as much to the Israeli government as they do to the machines. If this is the future of warfare we've taken a dark new path.
Actually, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots fired its campaign manager Ousman Noor as a result of him advocating against the IDF's killings in Gaza. The Campaign initially denied that it was over his Gaza advocacy, but eventually admitted that it was because of him speaking to diplomats which he met through the Campaign. Many members of the campaign support the IDF's arguable genocide, despite how surprising that might be.
I really want to support this, but the website is pretty bad. Blinding colors, poor and sparse information, and a links to shop/donate without a notion as to what or who the org is.
Given how gang-flagging as a form of censorship became prevalent here on HN I think they should consider removing flagging functionality for submissions entirely.
It should of course stay for comments but posts typically get flagged for political reasons and nothing else.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
this means they are actually targeting the children phones at night presupposing their father is in their proximity. they are doing this because Hamas operatives probably don't take their phones to their houses.
It is interesting to see how cell phone data was used as features and inputs to the model (along with other surveilance data). And how the models parameters were adjusted to achieve high leves of correlation. Human behavior regarding sharing cell phones apeared to create a false postive bias. Its too late now but the first thing the entire Palestinian population should have done was to smash all thier phones and go completely dark.
Next step is to automate this entire chain. Not far away from some military deploying fully autonomous identify, target & kill systems now. The pieces are all in place. Human rights and oversight are not the first priority in all militaries.
AI system says person X in location Y needs to be taken out due to "terrorist association". Check if location Y is cleared for operations. Command has given general authority for operations in this region.
An autonomous drone is deployed like a Patriot missile shooting out from some array into the night sky, quietly flies to location Y, identifies precise GPS coordinates and sends itself including a sizeable warhead into the target. Later, some office dude sits down at his desk at 8:30am, opens some reporting program.
Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.
Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely curious. If everyone was as honorable as you and decided to stop working for the military industrial complex - do you think China and Russia would just sit back and say "That's cool - we didn't want Americas land/resources/overseas territories anyway" ?
This is like a thief saying that they steal something because otherwise another thief would steal it. What the parent is suggesting is that engineers around the world should agree to not make such systems similar to how doctors have the hippocratic oath. It may seem naive and can probably never prevent such systems from being built but I think it's worth a try. We have to collectively agree on systems we should not build.
It sure would be nice if this industry had the tiniest shred of collective consciousness and realized our capacity to exert some level of control over what gets built and what doesn't.
I took computer ethics 101 about 20 years ago (that was the only ethics class on my math/cs degree plans). I learned that the ethical thing to do when a system kills unintentionally/accidentally, you stop it and redesign from the ground up from first principles evolved beyond the principles used to design the killing version.
This needs to be applied to nation-states & so much more we're engineering.
I'd love to see a design methodology grounded in accounting for all nondual needs of humans. This idea usually comes with complaints of that being an impossible task, without really understanding the issue.
No, the "other option" is to realize that keeping people in what is effectively little more than a concentration camp with no hope of perspective or solution can only end in violence. Especially if you also start shooting the peaceful protestors like they did a few years ago. And then the government goes in to bed with the most extreme of extreme religious Zionists who quite literally support ethnic cleansing and murder.
That is not a justification or a moral judgement, it's just a fact that this will happen. This is what has always happened throughout history. To deny it is to deny reality.
Something Oct-7 shaped was bound to happen. You can't kick people in the face for 50 years, give no perspective for improvement, kick them harder in the face when they object, and expect all of them to forever turn the other cheek and have carefully nuanced opinions on the matter. That's just not how people work.
Current actions are not just killing Palestinians, it's also killing (future) Israeli. A new Oct-7 shaped event is bound to happen again if the current course is followed.
None of this is rocket science. None of this is a novel insight. People have been saying this for decades (have we forgotten the previous events like the intifada, the wide-spread protests 5 years ago, etc. etc.)? Some people were seemingly born on the morning of Oct 7 or something.
That isn't that calculus that a moral people run. We operate in the present, with the tools we have now with compassion. Unless you are the people working on these AI targeting tools, how do you know what they understand.
Not to be combative with the response here, but the density of destruction in Gaza is on par with the likes of Dresden. It's not really exaggeration to say that Gaza is one of the most bombed places since Vietnam, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can go to companies like Maxor and purchase satellite images on the open market and see for yourself.
Not everyone sees the world as you do. Given this article and other information I know about this system, I would be honoured to work on it and take a significant pay cut, as it actively makes the world a better and safer place.
I am reminded of Poindexter's[1] total information awareness project, which I thought at the time too interesting for it to wholly disappear. I must admit this knowledge influenced one or two of my own blog postings on what I call "Strategic Software"[2].
So much technological power, and still no approach to prevent violence and imprison aggressors and murderers instead of killing them
In the past there was all this talk of nonlethal weaponry, but nowadays it seems to be used at best "in the small", by police and not the military
Killing will only ever get easier and faster and remote from human action, oversight and consequence for the perpetrator. Too fast for humans to understand, to remote too feel
You're right. Hamas and Israel are very similar, and basically at the same level of criminal behavior. But I don't think that was the point you wanted to make. I guess for you it's more humane to just bomb people but it turns out that the people who die in Gaza are just as human as those who died in October 7. It's hard to believe for Israelis since they have been killing thousands of Palestinians for decades now, but their lives aren't inherently worth less than those of Israelis.
I don't like anything about this war, but in a way, I think concerns of AI in warfare are, at this stage, overblown. I'm more concerned about the humans doing the shooting.
Let's face it, in any war, civilians are really screwed. It's true here, it was true in Afghanistan or Vietnam or WWII. They get shot at, they get bombed, by accident or not, they get displaced. Milosevic in Serbia didn't need an AI to commit genocide.
The real issue to me is what the belligerents are OK with. If they are ok killing people on flimsy intelligence, I don't see much difference between perfunctory human analysis and a crappy AI. Are we saying that somehow Hamas gets some brownie points for not using an AI?
I like this point, and I do think you're rightly pointing out that the issue is that selection of targets may be done badly, not that AI specifically is in the loop. With that said, I think an important detail you're overlooking is the frictionless-ness of this process. That quote people are throwing around about something like "efficiently producing the largest volume of human targets" gets to this point pretty directly I think. The problem is not just that the evidence might be flimsy, it's also that it's extremely easy to generate massive lists of targets.
Instead of the Milosevic example I'd say it's analagous to Dehomag machines during the Holocaust. The Nazis didn't need advanced database systems to attempt a genocide, but having access to them made it far far easier to turn the whole process into a factory line: something predictable and constant that allowed it to achieve a pace and scope far beyond what they would have been able to do otherwise. Similar here, or in other cases where advanced technology is brought to bear in war. Anything that makes human death more automated is, IMO, abhorrent and worth of criticism in it's own right.
I agree making something bad easier is bad too. But does AI make the bad thing easier here?
I see two cases here. One is that the AI has some non-negligible accuracy, and one where it doesn't. If it's somewhat accurate, then actually, using it is saving civilian lives, attacking only the active enemy.
And if it's inaccurate... Then presumably whoever made it knows it, and whoever uses it knows it's merely a fig leaf for shooting random people, and is ok with that. Is it then worse to kill random people as found by an AI than to drop a bomb somewhere, because you have a hunch there might be a worthwhile target there? This is the bit I'm not sure of.
In this war, it's so easy to find the other side. If you want to recklessly shoot civilians, they are just on the other side of the wall. I'm not sure that AI makes it any easier.
How does this system get the input? Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers? Or is it possible to use roaming towers for this? Is e.g. Google or Facebook involved on a mobile OS or app level? Maybe backdoors local to the area?
It seems like the whole cell phone infrastructure need to be torn down.
That does not explain how the IDF know that the victims are at home. You'd more or less need security cameras for that.
I guess you can do some sort of common principal component analysis (CPCA) from known Hamas persons to create some sort of cluster based on cell phone location data or call data, somewhat like Spotify does with recommendation from "common songs".
I wonder if this might explain why so many journalists are killed, since they probably call Hamas leaders and meet them a lot more than most people in the data set.
That's my understanding. That the whole of the Gaza strip is essentially watched under the equivalent of stingrays and all traffic out is monitored with room 641a style taps.
Hmm, I wonder if that is related to why the use of 3G barely just rolled out and why they still aren't allowed to have 4G. Maybe that would require an upgrade of Stringray-like equipment?
That is concerning even if you don't have some lunatics trying to kill you right now.
IMSI seems like a thing that need to be mitigated. We need a FOSS mobile yesterday. Especially when Elon Musk puts cell towers everywhere and most likely give our locations to Washington and by extension Netanyahu.
Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
> Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy
I understand what you are getting at, but if you read the article this is not how this technology is being used, rather the opposite. The AI seems to use very broad criteria / flimsy evidence to decide who is a target, and then it is chosen to strike them specifically when they get home and would typically be surrounded by civilians (mostly women and children).
Their own testing showed 1 in 10 selected targets were not actually militants, but because it is statistically 'correct' (despite loose definitions of correct) 90% of the time all targets will be bombed. Add the fact that collateral damage of 15-20 civilians is accepted even for the lowest ranking militants (and much higher for commanders) who are then targeted with unguided munitions, which makes this quite a lot less 'targeted' and 'efficient' than e.g. US drone strikes in Afghanistan.
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians
I haven't been putting much faith in numbers coming out of the region since Oct. Anyone capable of giving an accurate number is invested enough to be deeply biased in some direction. Well researched sources such as this one are directionally correct. But, you can't blame me for being suspicious of a magazine I just heard of.
> collateral damage of XYZ civilians is accepted
This is an operational decision. Even if the militants were identified by hand, the acceptable collateral was a decision made by some commander. I'm not sure how 'Lavender' (The central topic of this thread) affects this.
One argument is that 'the risk of technology' and 'the risk of how technology makes humans behave' are one and the same.
The article directionally points towards a Hanlon's Razor-esque disregard towards the shortcomings of Lavender. Any time people's lives are at stake, the bar needs to be sky-high. An intelligence operative will be trained to sniff out a fake-informant or a fake-asset from experience. They do not have the same intuitions for a statistical machine, and are likelier to ignore egde-cases, with disastrous outcomes. Some might think this is because 'Lavender coaxes them into doing it'. I believe 'humans are smart enough to know what they're getting into'.
______________________
All this being said, I repeat my earlier statement. We in the west have not seen real-war. We're applying civilian sensibilities to a situation where century long struggles have now morphed into full blown existential hatred among neighbors. US 'missions' in the middle east don't count, because they are fake wars. The US had nothing at stake. One fine day it randomly pulled out of Afghanistan and it affected the life of exactly 'zero' Americans. That's not war, that's military adventurism. The US has only ever sniffed risk 3 times in its existence. Pearl Harbor, WTC & Cuban missle crisis. Look at how it reacted in the immediate after-math of all 3, and you'll know the real face of 'American military'. Every thing else is PR and civilians happily drink the koolaid. (Here on out America = Pax Americana)
Coming back to 'real war'. What are the sensibilities of war when war is real? The price of human life is clearly not the same as peace-time. What collateral damage are Ukraine & Russia accepting as parts of their war? Look at the sheer number of deaths in recent wars/insurgencies [1]. These are mostly civilian deaths. The obvious question is - "If war is always bloody, why is everyone so caught up with this war in particular"?
That's because, Israel is unique in that it is a "western nation" engaging in war post-WW2. Western nations don't fight wars. They settled all neighborhood debates through the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. And foreign risks are crushed through NATO/American military superiority, before they ever gain momentum.
Lavendar and the Israeli military appears to place a low-value on human place. But, is this value lower than other peer-wars, or are we imposing civilian sensibilities onto war time ? I don't know. But, I dislike the hand-wavy confidence with which people choose an answer for this question.
It's not about the tech, it's about how humans use it. In this case, the IDF seems to be using tech to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is the mass murder, not the tech.
>While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,”
So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.
"This will get flagged to death in minutes as what happens to all mentions of israel atrocities here" (now dead)
It maybe worth noting that there is at least one notification service out there to draw attention to such posts. Joel spolsky even mentioned such a service that existed back when stackoverflow was first being built.
Human coordination is arguably the most powerful force in existence, especially when coordinating to do certain things.
Also interesting: it would seem(!) that once an article is flagged, it isn't taken down but simply disappears from the articles list. This is quite interesting in a wide variety of ways if you think about it from a global cause and effect perspective, and other perspectives[1]!
Luckily, we can rest assured that all is probably well.
One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said.
So they were having daily quotas for killings. Literally a killing machine with a input capacity of 1200 targets per day that has to be fed. Just like the Nazis during WW2
+972 magazine is EXTREMELY anti-Israel and anti-semitic, so this article is written through the lens of despising Israel and Jews. Here are some of their other article titles, which you can find on their home page:
1. Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science
2. The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism
3. The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine
As such, their view is not at all balanced or even-handed. Objective truth obviously matters very little to them since they exhibit such open bias and loathing towards Israel and the Jewish people.
Actually they are. The Jewish people IS Israel and Israel is the Jewish people. To loath Israel is to loath Jews, which is why you see violent pro-Hamas protests at synagogues around the world now. It is understood and ubiquitously accepted that the enemy of "anti-Zionists" are all Jews, and yes, many anti-Zionists are Jews themselves.
Yes. We have very anti-Israel intelligence officers who are politically placed on the far left. Just because you're Israeli doesnt mean that you're pro Israel. Same for the IDF (which Im a soldier in). Just by speaking to a heavily biased paper like 972 they show their own bias against the country. I serve with several soldiers who are more supportive of the Palestinians than their own country.
from what i understand, there appears to be little to no oversight on how these models are trained and evaluated.
if the markers, a la features, discussed in the article are anything to go with, it is a very disturbing method of classifying a target. if human evaluators use the same approach to target bombings, then there is no supporting how this war is being fought.
Unfortunately, Big Tech has been very effective in spreading a message that helps Israel maintain the plausible deniability that comes from a system like Lavender.
For at least 15 years we've had personalized newsfeeds in social media. For even longer we've had search engine ranking, which is also personalized. Whenever criticism is levelled against Meta or Twitter or Google or whoever for the results on that ranking, it's simply blamed on "the algorithm". That serves the same purpose: to provide moral cover for human actions.
We've seen the effects of direct human intervention in cases like Google Panda [1]. We also know that search engines and newsfeeds filter out and/or downrank objectionable content. That includes obvious categories (eg CSAM, anything else illegal) but it also includes value-based judgements on perfectly legitimate content (eg [2]).
Lavender is Israel saying "the algorithm" decided what to strike.
I want to put this in context. In ~20 years of the Vietnam War, 63 journalists were killed or lost )presumed dead) [3]. In the 6 months since October 7, at least 95 journalists have been killed in Gaza [4]. In the years prior there were still a large number killed [5], famously including an American citizen Shireen abu-Akleh [6].
None of this is an accident.
My point here is that anyone who blames "the algorithm" or deflects to some ML system is purposely deflecting responsibility from the human actions that led to that and for that to continue to exist.
“But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
Oh, very noble of you to take on that risk, from that side of the bomb sight.
> Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes.
This sounds immoral at first, but if proportionality is taken into consideration, the long term effects of this might be positive, ie fewer deaths long term due to the elimination of Hamas staff. The devil is in the details however, as there is clearly a point beyond which this becomes unacceptable. Sadly collective punishment is unavoidable in war, and one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target.
This article below states the civilian to militant death ratio in Gaza is 1:1, and for comparison the usual figure in modern war is 9:1, such as during the Battle of Mosul against ISIS. They may still be within the realm of moral action here, but the fog of war makes it very difficult to assess.
I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas, provide peacekeeping, integrate Palestine into Israel, and enforce property rights. All this bloodshed is revolting.
> I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas
Why? They don't care. They are mostly dictatorships, and it seems to me that it's good for the dictators if the conflict continues, so they can use Israel as something external to try to keep the people angry at (lower risk for revolution).
Using the latest advances in technology and computing to plan and execute an ethnic cleansing and genocide? Sounds familiar? If not, check "IBM and the Holocaust".
So an article by an organization that is pro-palestinian (“working to oppose occupation and apartheid”) publishes a story relying on multiple anonymous sources - Is there any reason we shouldn’t consider this propaganda? has this magazine ever published a story that goes against their preferred narrative?
… normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. …
Or to do away with the concept of starting and stopping wars altogether. Just constant AI based justifications for killing.
Wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't already been the case in Israel-Palestine already. AI targeting of Palestinians long before October 7th in other words.
Had a minor panic; I got to a final stage of an interview for a company called "Lavender AI". They were doing email automation stuff, but seeing the noun "Lavender" and "AI" in combination with "bombing" made me think that they might have been part of something horrible.
ETA:
I wonder if this is going to ruin their SEO...it might be worth a rebrand.
In Portuguese, the word for lavender, "lavanda", shares roots with the verb to wash, "lavar". It comes from Latin, and it's due to the blue lavender flowers being used in clothes washing in the past. So I think naming the system Lavender is a cruel joke, and betrays its true purpose. Laundering or whitewashing the killing of civilians, providing cover by automating plausible excuse-making. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
> The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
Tbh this feels like making a machine that points at a random point on the map by rolling two sets of dice, and then yelling "more blood for the blood god" before throwing a cluster bomb
Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn.
Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued.
Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing the suspect and their entire family that happened to be in the general vicinity? Is the math "one law enforcement > n lives as long as one was a (potential) badguy"?
If you wanted to do this with minimal civilian casualties, then you bring the ground forces in, block by block, and you clear things the old-fashioned way. You take casualties, but those are casualties who signed up to be "warfighters".
Now this IS inflamatory: I think we have a lot of warfighters and cops who are just plain cowards, that's the mentality. Why have a class of trained and armed people who are so afraid of dying that they'd rather kill anything and everything in their path than potentially be injured or killed?
I thought the ethos of the warfighter and law enforcement was "act as a shield, act as a bulwark, save lives, give my life so that others may be free, etc etc". Nowadays its "nah I'm not going in that school, there's badguys with guns and I might die, just stay outside".
That leads to a failure of imagination where somehow "blow up a building with innocent people as long as you got your target" seems somehow justified because you didn't risk a 'good guy' life. Cowardice.
In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.
> AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI
No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
I think that depends on what the alternative is. It seems to me that the problem is that there's no way for Israel to wipe out Hamas without massive collateral damage. However, instead of giving up on wiping out Hamas, they just decided that they are OK with the collateral damage.
I think the concern is that the AI is making life or death judgements against people. Some may of course be lawful combatants under the rules that govern such things, but the fact that an AI is drawing these conclusions that humans act on is the shocking part.
I doubt an artillery system using machine learning to correct its trajectory and get better accuracy would be controversial, since the AI in that case is just controlling the path of a shell that an operator has determined needs to hit a target decided upon by humans.
We need to consider what are the other options in that situation, my thinking is that due to Hamas being fully embedded in the civilian population, the only other "reasonable" method is to carpet bomb... After reading the article I much prefer the AI method.
Both of these options are war crimes. I think only talking about these two options presents a false dichotomy. There are many more options that could have been considered. For example, Israel could have accepted the hostage swap and then picked Hamas operatives slowly but surely given their superior military and intelligence. Israel however prefered killing lots of civilians as "collateral damage" in order to kill a few Hamas operatives and they didn't even manage to rescue hostages. The crime lies in the blatant disregard for civilian life in Gaza.
No the AI was the scapegoat for IDF deciding to "target" low-level enemies, then bombing them with bunker-buster 2000lb bombs that leveled entire buildings and city blocks around those targets.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.
Any human being would not accept this. If it is happening to Palestinian people, it will happen to any other country in the world. Israel is committing genocide in front of the world. 50 years from now, some people will be sorry while committing another genocide.
be ready to be targeted by AI, from another state, within another war
what prevents Lavender from being deployed in EU or US for targeting Hamas operatives abroad ? People would get assassinated randomly and nobody would know why
Israel can freely bomb the shit out of Gaza as much as they want because it's "other" people's blocks and homes being destroyed. Pretty sure the US blanket protection of Israeli war crimes would go away if apartment buildings in Philly started to get leveled as well.
What was the code name for the AI that slaughtered 1200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage? What kind of decision making went into Hamas raping dozens of women? What kind of AI chose targets in Israel to rocket? One thing's for certain, humans no matter how "enlightened" can only take so much before they go absolutely postal. "Humanity" and "rules of war" go right out the window when humans are pushed too far. It was going on before this war and will go on afterwards. What, now that we have "precise" weapons, an all-out war of one country vs another will adhear to some kind of code of ethics? Give me a break. Dresdin bombings, Hiroshima, Nanking, etc etc civilians will ALWAYS get slaughtered 1000 to one in an all-out war.
Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target?
972mag is a left-wing media and what they say should be viewed with skepticism because they follow a pro-Palestine narrative.
Given israel's well-documented history and proclivity to commit genocides against the innocent (ironic given what happened in ww2), why is this time in particular so egregious? I don't get it. Poor AI accuracy is an accepted reality not just in civilian systems.
On silver lining for those who lost their lives to his particular holocaust: These technologies in particular have a tendency of ending up used against the very people who created them or authorized their use.
It’s slightly more complicated a.) looks like male b.) lives here c.) send unguided munition if less than 15 or 100 other non targets depending upon value of target.
I'm probably pro-isreal because I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest. (But I'm not strong either way)
Just watched someone get their post deleted for criticizing Israel's online PR/astroturfing.
Israel's ability to shape online discussion has left a bad taste in my mouth. Trust is insanely low, I think the US should get a real military base in Israel in exchange for our effort. If the US gets nothing for their support, I'd be disgusted.
Posts don't get deleted on HN, except on rare occasions when the author asks us to delete something (and usually then only if they didn't get replies).
Posts do get flagged and/or killed, whether by user flags, software, or mods, but you can always see all of those if you turn 'showdead' on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
If you notice a post getting flagged and/or killed that shouldn't have been, you can let us know and we'll take a look. You can also use the 'vouch' feature, also described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest, which is why I 100% oppose Israel's war. Israel has spent decades playing us for fools, disregarding all our concerns and making the world hate us while taking billions of our money. Here is how Netanyahu talks about us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8TxOwYte0
In another post, my comment about Act.IL and Hasbara Fellowships were not only mass downvoted, but after being killed the commenter indicated this was their intention and wished me a nice day. Felt creepy. Dang brought it back up, to his great credit.
It is the promised land of the Bible (Torah), where there used to be The Temple to THE God. As for all the details arising from that, that's the realpolitik.
There are two dimensions of horror here: One is that we as a tech community are building systems that are able to automatically kill human beings. It’s not only this system. I‘ve seen images of drones with sniper guns shooting everyone moving: Kids, women, innocent men. Drones flying constantly humming above the heads of Palestinians, always observing them. The feeling that death can come anytime. What a f-ing nightmare. Can we in the west even imagine what life that is?
The second is this: Why is a western ally allowed to have Apartheid, allowed to kill thousands of women and children with or without AI, besiege (medieval style) 2.3mil civilians, starve and dehydrate them to death, all the while comparing a tiny area without war planes, without a standing military, without statehood to Nazi Germany and Gaza to Dresden to completely level Gaza? To Nazi Germany that had the most advanced technology of their time, threatening the whole world? Dehumanising Palestinians by declaring them all „terrorists“, mocking their dead, mutilated bodies in Telegram groups with 125k Israelis (imagine 4mil US citizens in a group mocking other nations dead children). Why do we allow this to happen? Why is a western ally allowed to do this while almost all our western governments fund and support this and silence protest against it?
To answer your question - however you feel about Israel, if you live in the west, it is absolutely not in your best interest to have Russia or China be buddies with Israel, which either would very gladly be.
I am more curious about the “compute” of an AI system like this. It must be extremely complicated to do real-time video feed auditing and classification of targets, etc.
How is this even possible to do without having the system make a lot of mistakes? As much AI talk there is on HN these days, I would have recalled an article that talks about this kind of military-grade capability.
Are there any resources I can look at, and maybe someone here can talk about it from experience.
This article tries to hint that Israel is doing a genocide at Gaza, which is not true.
I'm not sure what is wrong with this technology. They barely say at the achievements this technology has gained, and only speaking about the bad side.
This article tries to make you think behind the scenes that Israel is a technology advanced, strong country, and Gaza are poor people whom did nothing.
It didn't even speak about the big 7 October massacre, where tens or even a hundreds innocent women were raped, because they were Israelis. I'm not sure when this kind of behavior is accepted in any way, and it makes you think that Hamas is not a legit organization, but just barbaric monsters.
Be sure that Gaza civilians support the massacre, and a survey reports that 72% of the Palestinians support the massacre[1], spoiler: it's much higher.
I believe it's more a reference to the allowed civilian casualty rate. If they're allowed to kill 10 or more civilians per bombing of a suspected target, then even if they're 100% accurate in targeting their suspects, 90%+ of the people killed will be civilians.
How do people that work on AI reconcile the fact that the product they're working on is going to be used to kill thousands of people with no recourse?
It seems like Israel is already bombing indiscriminately, with 35 000 killed (the majority of whom are women and children). Was AI used for these targets?
History is going show a similar story to when IBM helped facilitate the Holocaust, this genocide also has people working on tools that enable it; people "just doing their job."
Did AI target World Central Kitchen or the 200+ humanitarians, journalists, hostages and medics? This is just one aspect of Apartheid Israel's war crimes.
Apartheid Israel seems to be a pariah state, if it's not with their hacking or bombing consulates, it's with the military industrial complex relationship with the US. Do they think their actions are conducive to their well-being?
> “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Red flag for me is the part where they say it was left for human to decide if AI generated correct target or false positive based on voice recognition performed by human:
(...) at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice (...)
...sounds fake as shit. Any dumb system can make male/female decision automatically, no fucking way human needs to verify it by listening to recordings while sohphisticated AI system is involved in filtering.
Why would half a dozen, active military offcers brag about careless use of tech and bombing families with children while they sleep risking accusation of treason?
Feels like well done propaganda more than anything else to me.
It's plausible they use AI. It's also plausible they don't that much.
It's plausible it has high false positive rate. It's also plausible it has multiple layers of crosschecks and has very high accuracy - better than human personel.
It's plausible it is used in rush without any doublechecks at all. It's also plausible it's used with or after other intelligence. It's plausible it's used as final verification only.
It's plausible that targets are easier to locate home. It's plausible it's not, ie. it may be easier to locate them around listed, known operation buildings, tracked vehicles, while known, tracked mobile phone is used etc.
It's plausible that half a dozen active officers want to share this information. It's also plausible that narrow group of people have access to this information. It's plausible they would not engage in activity that could be classified as treason. It's also plausible most personel simply doesn't know the origin of orders up the chain, just immediate.
It's plausible it's real information. It's also plausible it's fake or even AI generated, good quality, possibly intelligence produced fake.
Frankly looking at AI advances I'd be surprised if propaganda quality would lag behind operational, on the ground use.
I can't read the news because it's so upsetting to watch the world allow a naked genocide, or discuss it with my family. The 7 Nov terrorist attack was disgusting, and since then Israel has proved to the entire world, beyond anyone's remaining doubt,that they are a disgusting nation.
So, it's a sociopathic AI, I guess, as it kills predominantely children, women, and elderly. Great job, Israel! The king has no clothes - the whole world now nows that Israel is a terrorist and apartheid state!
The world has been at a perpetual war for forever! That is actually quite interesting in of itself.
There has been no mass self-correction to my knowledge that would avert this kind of destructive behavior.
But in saying that, I am fully aware that most of such behavior stems from people who are in charge of the world at a political level.
Is it implausible to think that this is something that will have to change in order for the world to change?
The war doesn’t serve anyone but a few rotten minds who are trying to make decisions on behalf of millions if not billions of people.
And we share a similar nudge. I do think that was is happening in the world today is a mere preparation (of society) for a massive power struggle in various parts of the world that will inevitably lead to a full-blown war. But this is only my personal feeling/interpretation.
Judged by number of war-related deaths per capita, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. The last major conflict was the Second Congo War in the ‘90s, which killed around 5.4 million people and involved a bunch of African nations. If you want to talk about scary wars, try reading about that one.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.
I don’t see magnitude of mortality as necessarily a good indicator for the prevalence of violence or “peace”.
Let’s say, for the sake of the thought experiment, that every weekday, a small swarm of killer drones is released in your city. These drones reliably, randomly target and kill 250 commuters per weekday.
That’s only 62,500 people per year. Pretty mild. Certainly nowhere near as bad as Covid, maybe about as bad as a bad flu year, right? Heart disease kills about 700,000 people a year, so it’s not even 10% of that. Barely registers on the dashboard.
War is terrible. War has always been terrible. It was almost certainly worse in the past, but it still sucks now. Most of the things you mention were way worse 100 years ago.
Sure, AI didn't write the propaganda, instead humans did. The affect was the same.
Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do.
But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
It's been pretty clear to me for a while now that Israel's long term plan for the Palestinians is to expel them all. Starvation isnt a requirement for that, but it is probably the path of least resistance. I will say that its happening a lot faster than I expected though, Israel definitely taking advantage of the situation here.
> And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
Back in 2002 or so, a friend of mine swore blind that an American had been arrested for wearing a "give whirled peas a chance" T-shirt — which is an anecdotal way of saying: are you sure you've got the full story?
I'm learning German by listening to „Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten“ by Deutsche Welle, and it definitely looks like a lot of people are less than enthusiastic about how Israel's forces are conducting themselves in war despite the constant note that Hamas is (1) a terror organisation that (2) started this particular round by killing 1000 civilians: https://www.dw.com/en/israel-withdraws-from-gazas-devastated...
Germany is also extremely sensitive to every aspect of this due to the events of 80 years ago.
Reports I've seen from the BBC show that there are significant protests in Israel, by those who consider the war to be justified, against their own government, not only for dropping the ball by failing to prevent the initial attack, but also for driving a wedge between them and their closest allies with the conduct of the war: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68722308
>In Berlin, authorities banned a pro-Palestinian rally from being held.[176] A number of spontaneous demonstrations protesting the bombing of Gaza took place across the country, but were forcefully broken up by police.[177] Germany banned fundraising, the displaying of the Palestinian flag and the wearing of the keffiyeh.[13]
>In Neukölln, a neighborhood of Berlin, pro-Palestinian protesters described police crackdowns on protest that were "shocking and violent".[180]
> But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel.
Add religious indoctrination to that. A huge number of Americans are evangelical Christians who unconditionally support Israel because they are utterly convinced that the continued existence of Israel is a necessary prerequisite for the reincarnation of their god.
There is something like a generational divide going on here. Much of the older generation remembers the wider Israeli-Arab conflict (ongoing since 1948, and arguably even decades before that) as "Israel's neighbors repeatedly invade it to try to wipe it off the map." But the last such war was 1973; even the Second Intifada ended in 2005. For the younger generation, the conflict is largely "Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors to tamp down on terrorism." In other words, Israel has largely shifted from being the aggressee to the aggressor in the conflict, and sympathy naturally tends to lie with the aggressee.
That said, there's also something noticeably different about this conflict. For the first time, the reporting I've seen in the mainstream press has generally been trending negative towards Israel. For example, the Washington Post has had a recent article on a press tour the IDF led of the burned-out remains of the hospital it attacked, clearly part of a campaign to justify why it was necessary, and the entire article was dripping with subtext of "we don't buy what the IDF is saying". And even the political headlines are generally framed in a way to keep you asking "should the US even be supporting Israel?"
Israel has already squandered all the sympathy it got from the terrorist attacks last October, and it's well on the way to squandering all residual sympathy from the Holocaust. And the Israeli political and military establishment seems to have zero clue that this is going on.
That’s not true. Within a short time of forming, all the surrounding nations attacked Israel to ensure they wouldn’t exist there. Israel’s opponents regularly targeted civilians with indiscriminate bombings since that’s what their morals produce. They planned to keep doing that over time, too. Keep that in mind when interpreting everything else.
At times, Israel allowed for a two-state solution but Hamas wanted every Jew there dead or gone. They’d push them into the ocean itself if allowed. People called for Israel reducing their presence in Gaza for peace. Doing that led to more attacks instead of more peace.
Recently, Hamas killed and kidnapped civilians on purpose. Whereas, Israel warned people to leave before the invasion where they then focused on military targets. If people stayed and were connected to those, they’ll likely die during the invasion. The OP is about people who stayed that are mostly connected to militants. OP writer pities their families but not all the non-militant families Hamas killed.
While both sides are plenty guilty, one is actually aiming for peace, focusing on military targets, and reducing civilian casualties. The other broke peace, attacked civilians, and called for more genocide. The difference between these two strategies shows that anyone wanting long-term stability with less murder in the area should support Israel.
Also, Israel is allied more with us while their opponents keep funding terrorist groups, including our own enemies. They’re also strong, economic partners. Why on earth would we ditch our friends to back people who do little for us and support our enemies?
There are still millions of Palestinians left to kill
After that there will be the surrounding countries to deal with. Who is going to die to fight these? Americans? After Afghanistan you expect them to come to the rescue forever?
For people who are actually interested in this topic instead of bad-faith race-baiting, there is a ton of investigative journalism and academic analysis of the methods of the actually-existing Israel lobby.
Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimer "The Israel Lobby"
> “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
I’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
"AI" in this case is probably mostly Oct 6 cell phone locations.
It is obvious that Israel has loosened their targeting requirements, this story points to their internal justifications. The first step in ending this conflict must be to reimpose these standards of self restraint.
And they are illegal [in many places] because we haven't had the right conversations. We need to codify solutions to the trolley problem so decisions in bad circumstances align with what we expect.
What part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality?
There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.)
If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the overall death in a war is to use your precise weapons to take out the most impactful enemy.
Which part of this is different than how you see the world so that reading this quote threw you?
I know war isn't pretty, but I really didn't expect that openly displayed level of callousness. Saying 'we think these people should be dead, but they are not important enough to warrant our "good" bombs', to me, says a lot about the mentality of the people in charge of that military assault: those aren't human lives, those are items on a 'to kill' list, and they aren't surrounded by civilians, but 'acceptable collateral damage'.
>> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”
expensive relative to what? a single rifle bullet? jdam kits are not expensive, easy to manufacturer, and there's plenty of 500lb dumb bombs lying around. If a country has access to precision guided bomb tech then I'd say the should be obligated to use it for bombing exclusively.
"Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination."
Hamas combatants like fried chicken, beer, and women. I also like these things. I can't possibly see anything wrong with this system...
This literally looks like any aborrhent ai "predicting" system such as the ones we've heard a ton about in the past, with the same mistakes (I wonder if they're really mistakes, bugs, or ahem... Features)
Our premiere AI geniuses were all sqawking to congress about the dangers of AI and here we see that "they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Sounds like you want to censor information that could hurt your bottomline.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
HN, both its community and the moderators, flag posts that generate a lot of conflict in the comments. The comments on this are especially bad by HN standards and therefore the flagging is inline with how the site is openly operated.
I am pro Palestine and not simping for Israel. I think visibility on Israel's actions matter, but HN is also very clearly not the appropriate website for a lot of politically involved news.
I disagree with this, in this issue and more broadly. Technology and hacking are inextricably linked to politics, whether we like it or not. We cannot separate the effects technology has on society and the body politic, and politics has an effect on technology through regulatory regimes, policy, and the law. These discussions are important to the development of technology even if it makes people uncomfortable to see views they disagree with, though of course there are discussions that are unproductive and should not be allowed on this specific forum.
Just as an example, the EU is setting a lot of law and policy surrounding technology right now, affecting how companies like Apple operate or putting policy into place to regulate emerging technologies like AI. The people who make the technology should be aware of those policies, how it affects what they build, and society's view on the products of their development more broadly.
I realize Israel and Palestine is a charged topic, but in my view, the high stakes of that conflict and the threat to human life on both sides means it's more important to have conversations about technology in that context, not less. Those conversations are probably going to hurt somebody's feelings, but we ought to talk about issues like how freedom of speech online and terrorism are connected and how AI systems and the military are mixing because it's important to maintaining the ethical fabric of our profession.
HN has a serious problem if factual technology stories cannot exist here because some people don't like the truth.
This should be advertised. The true price of AI is people using computers to make decisions no decent person would. It's not a feature, it's a war crime.
I think it takes a tiny number of flags to nuke a post, independent of its upvotes, so strong negative community opinions are always quick to kill things.
To restore it, mods have to step in, get involved, pick a "side".
I think the flagging criteria needs overhauling so popular, flagged posts only get taken down at the behest of a moderator. But that does mean divisive topics stay up longer.
For the nothing it's worth, I don't see this post as divisive. It's uncovering something ugly and partisan in nature, but a debate about whether or not an AI should be allowed to make these decisions needn't be partisan at all.
Only allowing 20 seconds to verify that you are male (nothing else). Intentional night bombings to increase the chance of hitting your target, but ignoring that you're hitting a residential, killing a target's family and neighbours by association. Programming in a allowable "10% error rate", which looks more like a success rate when you factor in collateral. These aren't acceptable in war. If this is news, you need to read the article.
There are, of course, many other concerns with Israeli conduct in and around Gaza.
I agree that war is a dirty process, but trying to differentiate this from genocide is increasingly tough.
I've written a lot about how we approach this. If you or anyone would like to know more, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 in this thread and the links back from there.
It's not as much about the comments as it is about Israel. Anything putting them in bad light gets insta-flagged and HN moderation is ok with this. For example, I give my own comment 5 minutes max.
IDF flag everything. You just need to watch the live comments on any YT video about what they are doing in Gaza to see they have a mommoth operation going on of silencing everything and putting up lots of Anti Muslim vile.
Why do you blame Americans? From my personal point of view, we Europeans are much more supportive of Israel. The streets in western Europe are misleading because western Europe is full of Muslim immigrants and champagne socialists.
Killing these civilians is one way to ensure that these people will be reliable Hamas supporters for years to come. Absolutely crooked that Israel is treating Hamas as though it was a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and fully responsible for them. This isn't some kind of democracy we're talking about.
Two can play that game: if the Israeli government didn't want their civilians to be killed, then they wouldn't occupy Palestine. As they don't care for israeli lives, they conscript every adult into their military, making them all valid targets.
The IDF is headquartered in the middle of Tel Aviv. Unlike them, the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza don't have a lot of options. It's effectively a concentration camp and it's one of the most densely populated areas on earth. So you're effectively saying you don't accept Palestinians have a right to resist their colonization. Just say that, rather than trying to hide behind "human shield" tropes.
The issue as I see it is that the tools available don't just determine how a given war is fought, they also determine whether it is fought at all.
If Israel wasn't able to use tools like this, then it probably wouldn't be viable for them to identify much of Hamas (that's kind of the point of guerilla warfare). Since that would make it difficult to fight a war efficiently, they would be more likely to engage in diplomacy.
Very doubtful. There is no room for any diplomacy after such an attack. It would be fought with more primitive weapons and the side with more bombs would prevail.
No, probably not. When the topic at hand is the selection criteria used to justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, your stance on whether the ones killing tens of thousands of civilians are justified in doing so is rather intrinsic.
I'm not sure that is possible. The nature and limitations of current AI technology means that it is almost impossible to talk about it without coming to certain conclusions about the party using it.
To put it bluntly, useing AI to decide on targets for lethal operations in unconsiounable given the current and forseable state of technology.
Come back to me when it can be trusted to make mortgage eligability questions without engaging in what would be blatantly illegal discrimination if not laundered by a computer algorithm.
In October 7th, by murdering, raping and abducting 1200 Israel civilians, Hamas - the acting sovereign of Gaza - chose total war. I hope this serves as a lesson to all those in Iran, Iraq, Syria and especially Lebanon who think of about repeating this.
This practice is akin to physically and mentally abusing a puppy, let them grow into a fearful and aggressive dog then say: "what an aggressive dog ! they need to be euthanized"
What does that even mean? 972 is a local Israeli outfit, with contributors from Israel and Palestine. They have sources within the IDF, sources who may be center-left leaning and are "done" with how the far-right coalition is running this war and they are blowing the whistle on this practice.
972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe. I'm happy they're reporting, but they have a very obvious bias, and I'd take anything they say with a huge amount of caution.
I wonder if the name Israelis gave the system betray their intent. I noticed in Portuguese, our word for Lavender, "lavanda", sounds similar to the verb meaning to wash, "lavar". According to wikipedia[1] it goes back to old latin roots: "The English word lavender came into use in the 13th century, and is generally thought to derive from Old French lavandre, ultimately from Latin lavare from lavo (to wash), referring to the use of blue infusions of the plants." I belive it is the same root behind English words like laundry or laundering. So, naming it 'Lavender' appears to give a clue to its true purpose: Laundering, our whitewashing the mass scale killing of civilians as collateral damage from computer-targeted strikes against militants, automating and streamlining the creation of plausible sounding excuses to provide cover for mass commitment of criminal acts.
I expected more comments on the source’s biases, given the contentious and sensitive topic; journalist Liel Leibovitz writes this about +972 Magazine (1):
> Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine.
> And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.
Years ago, scholars (such as Didier Bigo) have already raised concerns about the targeting of individuals merely based on (indirect) association with a "terrorist" or "criminal". Originally used in the context of surveillance (see Snowden revelations), such systems would target anyone who would be e.g. less than 3-steps away from an identified individual, thereby removing any sense of due process or targeted surveillance. Now, such AI systems are being used to actually kill people - instead of just surveil.
IHL actually prohibits the killing of persons who are not combatants or "fighters" of an armed group. Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time. Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc.
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried. Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
Lavender is so scary because it enables Israel's mass targeting of people who are protected against attack by international law, providing a flimsy (political but not legal) justification for their association with terrorists.
[1]: https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc-002-0990...
It always starts with making a list of targets that meet given criteria. Once you have the list its use changes from categorisation to demonisation -> surveillance -> denial of rights -> deportations -> killing. Early use of computers by Germans during WW2 included making and processing of lists of people who ought to be sent to concentration camps. The only difference today is that we are able to capture more data and process it faster at scale.
There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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One of the reasons for the adoption of the Hollerith Tabulator in the great 1890 Census - arguably the birth of computing in the United States - was the increasing concern about . . let's say ethnics. To be frank, there were too many of them. "Japanese," "Chinese," "Negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon," "negrito", etc etc. So in 1890, we needed dozens of new categories, and the old methods simply would not work. At least in terms of usable - actionable[1] - data in a quantitative setting.
Its success was so marked that it was immediately decided in 1893 to move a Tabulator to Ellis Island, to count the ethnics from the source with Hollerith's new technology. Herman Hollerith had great success in his own lifetime, the technology eventually becoming the core of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, otherwise known, a decade later, as International Business Machines.
The establishment of this clear process surrounding race - actual race law - was, believe it or not, pretty novel in Western history. A lot of old-timey race policy - like the relationship between a monarch and the Jews, or what exactly a visiting Muslim could or couldn't do (like sell and buy slaves cough Venice cough) - this race stuff was almost always very, ah, what we'd call "tribal knowledge". A Jew in the Middle Ages could have far greater rights and lifestyle than in later periods, but those rights were completely unpredictable; this was true to greater or lesser extent for many "outsiders" in the early European era. Even in 1900 American innovation in race law - based on "Science!" - was a new thing, and extremely exciting to the enthusiasts of folk movements[2] crisscrossing our entire civilization[3] at the time. One of those was Willy Heidinger, who established Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft to produce license-built Hollerith machines. World events interceded, however, and the German civil service infrastructure to run a census would not be present until much later . . 1933, in fact, when things would get very spicy indeed in the world of race "science".
And then, of course, cataclysm: the end of the European Order.
On the European continent, a debt to truth was paid. A hundred million dead or maimed, nations wrecked, a whole world - a weltanschauung - burnt down to the foundations - below the foundations. But elsewhere - like in the New World - the lesson was not as stark. And in yet other places the inverse lesson was learned: once you determine a person is not a person, you must brutalize yourself and your population immediately, before the soon-to-be-unpeople realizes that the struggle is existential.
Let's wrap this up.
What 20th century Race Science/Race Law were trying to do was make sense of something as complicated as human culture but using the sciences they understood: 19th century statistics, the physics of iron and steam. Those were the sciences with the capital backing, so - of course! - those were the only science that mattered. Today, we're looking at another complex element of the human experience - human language, human consciousness - and again, we're looking at it through the science that's got the most capital backing it: computation. That's how "text" somehow, incredibly, came to contain "language". Or how "scarcity" was represented by "money" - as if there were any N-dimensional descriptions that could adequately vectorize either of those concepts.
Ultimately, when you really dig yourself into these sorts of artificial - if not downright dishonest - "science-y" establishments, when you start imposing them on the world, you don't break out of them easily. Or without damage. The people making use of your LLM widget do not understand the math - all they know, like the race science of previous centuries - is that it's Science-y. It might as well be wearing a Mitre and Crosier.
[1] What those actions were, is a subject for another post. Probably inside a soon-to-be-flagged topic.
[2] The American example in race law was also very exciting to a certain Mr. Adolf Hitler, as well. You can read all about it in Mein Kampf. Hitler's attitude towards America is really fascinating stuff, but an entirely other subject.
[3] And beyond! Ethnonationalism spread like fire, as colonized peoples realized this could be their big ticket towards peerage in the European age.
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IBM decided who was jewish, roma, socialist, and so on? IBM:s machines found these people and brought them to the attention of genocidal authorities?
> Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc.
There is some incredible magic that often happens: as soon as anyone is targeted and killed, they immediately transform from civilians to "collaborators", "terrorists", "militants" etc. Of course everything is classified and restricted to avoid anyone snooping around and asking questions.
In Norway it is rather the other way:
We all know (if we stop and think) that a person can be both a teacher and a terrorist.
But according to media here almost every victim except top Hamas brass seems to be referred to by their whatever else they were besides terrorists and the terrorists (or even just soldier) part get hushed down.
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Another one is when you label any 15+ year old male as "military age" and treat them as combatants.
On the flip side, in this war many of the Gaza combatants are either irregular forces or militants deliberately wearing civilian clothing.
So if some guy in a track suit and flip-flops uses an anti tank grenade launcher, discards the empty tube, walks away, and gets lit up, then the next day the Internet is awash with videos of the “IDF murdering a civilian!”
For reference, I think both sides are in the wrong in this conflict, and Israel more than Gaza.
However, the Internet is full of armchair international law experts that are being played like a fiddle by Hamas’ propaganda arm.
Speaking of international laws of combat: no protections apply to non-uniformed combatants pretending to be civilians. None. They can be tortured, executed on the spot, whatever.
If you want protections to apply to you, then wear a uniform or never go anywhere near a gun.
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It's also interesting (and I guess typical for end-users of software) how quickly and easily something like this goes from "Here's a tool you can use as an information input when deciding who to target" to "I dunno, computer says these are the people we need to kill, let's get to it".
In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and maybe even what the higher-ups think, but I suspect it's become the latter.
I read that article and feel your interpretation is very misleading/wrong.
The Guardian article makes it clear prior to those denials that those higher-up appear to not to care how accurate it is and appear to be making a conscious choice to accept the fact it is highly flawed on the basis that it might kill some of whom they would legitimately claim as valid targets.
It's clear from the operational details discussed in the article the critical target number is largely number of kills, regardless of whether they are any actual material threat, or not.
Cull predominantly the male population and their family members, not assassinate active threats is the overall impression I got of the Israeli strategy.
I must add that anyone claiming the use of AI and inference models in this way is in anyway justifiable needs to seek help. The claim of 90% accuracy is almost certainly over claiming by over 100%.
20 second turnaround from target acquisition to strikes seems to guarantee it's become the latter.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
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"I'm sure that's what was intended"
Intended by who? You don't kill 13,000 children by accident.
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Ideally, that would be "Computer says we shouldn't kill these people, let's not".
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By the standards discussed in the article, anyone with a beef with Israel could justify targeting possible a majority of buildings in Israel. After all, most of the population is required to serve in the IDF.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are routinely doing exactly that.
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The current justification is that children WILL be IDF. So, this would be an upgrade, no?
What do you think all those rockets being intercepted by the Iron Dome are targeting?
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> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers,..
I think the loop-hole here is that a weapon manufacturing facility is almost certainly a military strategic target, and international law allows you to target the infrastructure provided the military advantage gained is porportional to the civilian death.
So you can't target the individuals but according to international law its fine to target the building they are in while the individuals are still inside provided its militarily worth it.
But presumably if you can target the building e.g. at night when nobody is there, that's preferable to targeting it during the day when there may be more civilian workers.
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Practical AI did a podcast episode about the dangers of using AI models as a shield to hide behind in justifying your decisions. The episode was titled "Suspicion Machines" and based on the libked article [1], and I think it's worth a read/listen.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-state-algorithms/
It's also an incentive to use it - accountability evasion.
Gitmo is still open, if the US isnt participating in those laws, I don't see how any of its allies are expected to
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack
It seems wrong that you can't target weapon manufacturers, can you cite a source? Weapon manufacturers contribute to the military action, and destroying weapon manufacturers contributes to military advantage.
You can target the manufacturing plants since they are military objectives but you cannot target the workers. If any war-sustaining activity would make you, as a person, a target, pretty much anyone could be bombed: farmers, bankers, power plant engineers, truck drivers, ...
For a source, you can check out the Red Cross document I linked. Specifically, Ctrl+F for "continuous combat function" and read the commentary on recommendation V. The Guidance is considered authoritative in legal circles.
In the case of Hamas, the US and Israel are the primary weapon manufacturer, as unexploded ordinance is the primary source of their explosives.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hamas-is-using-unexplo...
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This is a very 'anti-war' opinion by a lawyer affiliated with the Red Cross, not some sort of treaty or other convention. As an example, the Geneva Convention's scope of protection is much narrower.
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This happens in wartime:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/world-central-kitchen...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-02/israeli-strike-that-k...
Pretty disgraceful (which itself feels a disgracefully unimpactful thing to say regarding people losing their lives whilst doing charity work).
That's not exactly a prediction. It was was standard operating procedure for Warsaw Pact nations. They used human intel which was possibly even worse because it could manipulated out of malice.
> Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time.
The problem with Hamas is that they don't shy away from hiding combattants in civilian clothings or use women and children as suicide bombers. There is more than enough evidence of this tactic, dating back many many years [1].
By not just not preventing, but actively ordering such war crimes, Hamas leadership has stripped its civilian population of the protections of international law.
> Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
In regular wars, it's uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers, away from civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, residential areas). The rules of war make deviating from that a war crime on its own, simply because it places the other party in the conflict of either having no chance to wage the war or to commit war crimes on their own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_b...
> Hamas leadership has stripped its civilian population of the protections of international law.
You completely lose any credibility with this statement. Civilians can't be "stripped" of protections of international law.
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An entire civilian population cannot be stripped of its protections of international law. This type of dehumanising rhetoric is the exact filth that leads to genocide and other atrocities (as we can see happening live in recent months).
> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried.
In theory, yes. In practice--in which make believe world is this true?
If they can target "terrorist", unavoidably the system will be upgraded to target "politician" also.
It was upgraded to target politician's families, already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh
Always interesting to me how western diplomats do not just right out reject bombing of diplomatic buildings, but search for stupid justifications, if it's "others" being bombed and not their team.
Or politicians who don't reject targeting of other politicians' families for killing, when it's the politicians they "don't like" or whatever, and even tacitly support it. Or who don't say a word when a hospital is attacked and hundreds of people murdered in it over several weeks, and ultimately destroyed, but blab something about right to self-defence constantly, or IHL which according to legal experts is used mostly to enable mass murder, not to stop it. Kinda paradoxical for a law that was meant to prevent needless suffering.
It's like all these people have a death wish, because they're setting standards for future wars. And there will be future wars, even in Europe. Anyway, I lost all respect for all the idiot politicians I sadly voted for, who justify day and night the murder of medics, whole families, children, starvation, etc., when it's "the other", and are all up in arms when it's "us". I certainly won't be fighting for any of them, when the war comes here. They have 0 standards. I'll let them die according to their wishes and standards.
It would be difficult to deliberately design a set of rules that would prolong war and human suffering even longer than what you’ve described.
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This is demonstrably untrue (it happens of course, but is not ubiquitous as comabt footage demonstrates) and in any case does not obviate the LOAC.
I am okay with the notion that war is dirty and that Hamas will try to pretend to be civilians or whatever. I have some questions:
- if the weapons always wait for them at target locations, who is transporting the weapons at any given target location and why is that not the focus?
- if we know they try to use infrastructure like hospitals, the IDF clearly knows where Hamas is aiming to shelter in, why not militarily occupy hospitals but then otherwise allow them to run without delay vs sniping anyone who shows up in a window?
- how is it possible the IDF allowed premature babies to die in their incubators once medical staff left a hospital in Gaza (aka unoccupied facility for IDF to sweep through), such that once medical staff returned they were presented with their rotting bodies left untouched in the incubators?
- how were Israeli unarmed civilians waving white t-shirts get mistaken for armed Hamas combatants and shot dead when trying to escape from their capture?
- how did the World Kitchen convoy, which had provided the IDF their route and time and coordinates with clearly labeled trucks, get shot with targeted missiles from above?
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And you can justify any kind of civillian killing and genocide just like this.
Anyone can do anything, lets just target them all.
> It is very convenient to criticize it when you're not in it
Israel 'criticised' Hamas for their monstrous attack six months ago, started a war over it. Perhaps you're saying Israel should have just accepted it?
You know, perhaps this whole mess Israel is now involved in is a product of its own behaviour, and killing of loads more Palestinians is not likely to bring peace but further hate and evil.
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There seems to be little evidence to your statement “Israel seems to trying much harder to avoid civilian casualties than […]”. All estimates I have seen seem to indicate astonishing rates of civilian casualties, hence why Israel is getting so much criticism of basically indiscriminate killing in Gaza…
Even though you may not be necessarily wrong on how little regard those armies in those previous wars (and indeed all warring parties in those wars to some extent) had for the civilian population, the situation is Gaza is made so much more drastic because there’s already nowhere for the (already displaced for decades) population to go amid all this assault and bombing (not to mention the widespread starving and all those other factors, which combined led to the “genocide” claim levied by some). That’s also a reason why all western countries are trying to dissuade Israel from the Rafat assault.
Also, we have the idea that human beings are supposed to learn from those previous tragedies and do better, and that we’re in a much more civilized, peaceful and prosperous place than before, so it’s likely a disillusion and horror for a lot of people to see such a nightmarish scenario unfolding again in 2023. Some intrinsic parts about human nature and human societies will never change unfortunately.
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> Ai flagging targets sure beats the cold impunity of the strategic air campaign during wwii and vietnam by far.
Only on a single iteration of a Nash game.
If it tempts the politicians and generals to target larger areas because of the lower costs… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
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>civilians as shields
For as much as the IOF likes to market this expression, I only ever see them do it in the actual sense, like chaining literal 12 year-olds to the front of armored vehicles
https://www.btselem.org/ota/104/all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_in_the_Israeli%E...
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Is this meant to excuse the behavior of the Israeli military?
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Dresden rules should be applied to Gaza. Israel is way too considerate with Lavender. Every other house in Gaza is full of weapons.
So if you're just an 9-5 office based terrorist doing admin stuff, you're off limits?
Yes, if you think about actions rather than labels it makes sense. Otherwise every office worker in Israel would be a legitimate target too.
As a target for assassination? Yeah.
It makes sense. Blowing up a military HQ with a clerk in it makes sense. Blowing up a clerk walking on the sidewalk seems like a wasted effort.
You can come up with all sorts of justifications for anything. At the end of the day, time and time again, over the top escalation usually hurts the stronger party. Asymmetrical warfare doesn’t garner sympathy or military advantages to the stronger party.
I don't understand your point here. They are targeting militants with the system:
> Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark by all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.
Obviously any judgement is probabilistic.
Never thought I'd even consider this, but is this a case where those involved, producing and developing, this software should be tried for murder/crimes against humanity?
My understanding is that AI in it's current form is not an applicable technology to be anywhere near this type of use.
Again my understanding: Inference models by their very nature are largely non-deterministic, in terms of being able to evaluate accurately against specific desired outcomes. They need large scale training data available to provide even low levels of accuracy. That type of training data just isn't available, its all likely to be based on one big hallucination, is my take. I'd be surprised if this AI model was even 10% accurate. It wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 1% accurate. Not that accuracy appears to be critical from what I've read.
The Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai..., makes me wonder whether AI development should be allowed at all. Didn't even have that thought before today.
This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open.
Is this a naive take?
Depends on what "AI" means here. There is a spectrum of "we have a bunch of data in a database and some folks hand tuning queries" to "we built a deep learning network to predict XYZ." In the middle of that spectrum lie things like decision trees which provide explainable results.
It's the former, but from what I read in the article, a shady version of that is my take.
The computer basically appeared to randomise a high number of people to kill based on a very shallow dataset, weak data linking and a high desire to kill people who are Palestinian.
It's hard to read the details from the Guardian article and think of it as anything other than a randomised Israeli state murder machine. I can't envisage it being accurate to a point any reasonable person would accept it be used against someone they know, in any circumstances.
That it targeted 10's of thousands is utterly horrifying. That it was involved in any actual battleground scenario makes me think those involved in it's creation and sale are culpable.
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It is not a naive take. Not by a long shot. Knowingly working on the development or upkeep of such a system, full well knowing it's limitations, and knowing of it's aftermath obliterates any level of clean hands in my eyes.
It’s amply clear from reporting that the IDF has no formal RoE on the ground - low level commanders have full autonomy to kill whomever, whenever, with zero oversight.
The “AI” exists to retcon the justification for any particular genocidal act, but this is really just an old school mindless slaughter driven by anger and racism.
Guns/AI don't kill people. People do. If someone should be held responsible, it's the people that order the strikes.
Sorry. Guns do kill people. That's their whole point.
I know roughly ~1000 people. Maybe 10 of them have the physical capability of killing someone, in case you don't know, it's not actually that easy to do it yourself.
Of those not all could mentally do it under anything but the most extreme of circumstances. 2, maybe 3 might be actually capable of ending a life under extreme circumstances.
With a gun probably, at a guess, ~400 - 700 could kill someone if they got anxious/scared enough is my bet. Even if I'm way off it's a lot more than without a gun. Couple of hundred at least. Not 2, or 3!
So yes, I'm sorry, guns definitely, 100% kill people.
And more people will absolutely kill someone if they possess a gun, than if the didn't. And by extension same is true if AI.
I'm interested how you even come up with that response? It's obviously factually and logically wrong. What makes you think it makes a reasonable argument to anyone?
Also, worth pointing out, thar AI in this case is insanely unfit for it's purpose (unlike a gun) and will have randomly killed lots of innocent people, even if the AI algorithm says otherwise.
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The line gets blurred a little here though.
I give you a gun and say "shoot whoever you choose with this gun, the choice is yours".
I give you an AI powered gun and say "use this however you choose, I have programmed it to automatically shoot in certain circumstances".
In the latter case, I have some responsibility, because I shared in the decision making by programming the gun. Through my code I have put my proverbial finger on the trigger, right next to your finger.
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Hard to say without knowing all the facts, but it's quite reasonable to hold those who are accessories to atrocities responsible as well.
That's like saying "defibrillators don't save people, people save people".
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Said people are trusting the intel from the AI. Those who provide that intel possible should shoulder responsibility for its effects, or at least its efficacy.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk
this is such BS argument, before guns you could still kill people but it'd take a lot more effort & organization to kill en-masse. same deal if you apply this logic to nukes or missiles. yes those people should be held responsible but there should be a systematic regulation of AI-robot killing machines just like we have geneva accords for cluster munitions or unusually cruel weapons. this is just common sense 101.
Sorry but from an AI system that targets individuals to a system that kills them (they already have autonomous drones with computer vision) there is max 1-2 web services path. So AI kills people
> This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open.
Someone will double down and include AI into the execution phase via AI controlled drones, tanks, etc. Then they will claim no responsibility and blame the ghost-in-the-shell.
As bad as this story makes the Israelis sound, it still reads like ass-covering to make it sound like they were at least trying to kill militants. It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution, with the goal of rendering life in Gaza impossible.
> It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution
I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy. If there was an intentional policy to kills journalists, aid workers and medical staff you'd see a lot more dead.
And you have to be extremely naive or one sided to not realize that Hamas does use those type of roles as cover for their operations.
Not trying to justify Israel's actions because they are fucked up, but based on all the evidence we have you are clearly wrong.
> I really doubt that's the case
It is. The IDF shot once, then when a vehicle came to rescue survivors, they shot again. Then the third attempt at rescueing survivors, they shot a third time. Purposefully murdering aid workers that coordinated with the IDF before entering the area.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/idf-strike-on-gaza-aid-...
“…were traveling in a convoy that had been coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and was following an IDF-approved route. The vehicles had GPS trackers and SOS beacons broadcasting their positions”
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> I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy.
I will try to solve your doubt. Gaza is a closed area. You can't just cross freely the frontier unless Israel allows it. Before that, humanitarian organisations are required to inform directly to Israeli army about everything that they want to do, where they want to go, how many, an when. They are clearly identified by a logo at all times. Israel had every single piece of info necessary to avoid bombing aid workers and had it for weeks
Despite that, Israel can't avoid to keep killing this workers; and they were doing the same repeatedly, systematically, for the last six months, in multiple attacks that last tens of minutes (maybe even hours?), while singing "oops!, I did it again".
The theory of the honest mistake is getting really difficult to swallow.
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>And you have to be extremely naive or one sided to not realize that Hamas does use those type of roles as cover for their operations.
Why would Hamas use anything other than clearly uniformed soldiers, marked military vehicles, and civilian distanced military installations?
Yea this really seems like more of a weapon of propaganda directed at Israelis. If they didn't want people to know about it, we probably wouldn't know about it. The fact that we're talking about it is probably not an accident, and I guess the play here would be to convince Israelis that the army is technologically advanced and they know what they're doing, so don't question it. But AI or not they were going to commit genocide and violate every international humanitarian law on the book. But for the people that still believe the genocide is justified I think this probably improves the optics.
I don't know if this was really planned. With my best will, I cannot imagine the Israeli military & Netanyahu's government releasing this to cover their ass. This could be potentially something which worsens their actions and not lessen them.
Obviously, nobody in an international court will be able to say "... but the AI did it!" - This is just far too easy as a way out. There are rules to AI Usage and one of them is not a usage like that - as already said somewhere else: The AI is only as ethical/moral as the humans behind them.
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I'm disturbed by the idea that an AI could be used to make decisions that could proactively kill someone. (Presumably computer already make decisions that passively kill people by, for example, navigating a self-driving car.) Though there was a human sign-off in this case, it seems one step away from people being killed by robots with zero human intervention which is about one step away from the plot of Terminator.
I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. I know very little about military strategy-- without the AI would Israel have been picking targets less, or more haphazardly? I think there may be some mis-reading of this article where people imagine that if Israel weren't using an AI they wouldn't drop any bombs at all, that's clearly unlikely given that there's a war on. Obviously people, including innocents, are killed in war, which is why we all loathe war and pray for the current one to end as quickly as possible.
> B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
> “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.```
So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions.
This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.
I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.
But to my point:
> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.
To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
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I imagine you get to tune the probability window of "person is >90% likely a Hamas terrorist" and choose how many innocent people you kill. Who set the window?
"Hamas terrorist" criteria: a male of fighting age, give higher weight to those congregating with others of fighting age. Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set. Lovely.
>This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Reminds me of similar industrial thinking of a certain previous fascist government.
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I don’t like Lavender. I think humans should always be in the loop. I’d like to see more care by analysts for kill orders.
That said, any organization might do something if it’s 90% accurate. Assuming it even is (doubt it), I think any fair evaluation of such a technology must ask:
What is the accuracy of inexperienced humans in the same position who are rushing through the review during a blitz invasion? If they have battle experience, what about them, too? (I’m assuming most won’t.)
Is the system better than those humans or worse? How often?
Do the strengths and weaknesses of the system allow confidence scores on predictions to know which need more review? Can we also increase reviews when the number of deaths will be high?
That’s how I’d start a review of this tech. If anyone is building military AI, I also ask that you please include methods to highlight likely corner cases or high-stakes situations. Then, someone’s human instincts might kick in where they spot and resolve a problem even in the heat of war.
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It is very clear to me that that is a sentence reflecting the editorial interpretation of the paper rather than a direct quote. You might agree with the interpretation - I think I might - but that is very different from this specific sentiment being something Israeli leadership are openly saying.
90% is a BS number . Computed basis what ? What is the baseline how did they benchmark . Is there any data whatsoever to back this claim ?
They just spout a high number that is not 100% (clearly civilians are being killed publicly undeniably ) claiming 100% would be too obviously ridiculous.
More than half of 32,000+ (more under the rubble) killed are woman and children, Hamas is still quite able to fight, hardly any hostages has been recovered .
Israel labels any sort of civilian organization as hamas including journalists, medical and aid staff. 200 UN staff and 100 journalists are dead so far . Israel’s argument is UNWRA terrorist aiding and journalists were also secretly Hamas and doing non journalistic stuff when killed so they include them in legitimate targets .
If you consider everyone is Hamas unless otherwise proven then 90% is possible .
There is no realistic way an algorithm was designed factoring in the level of destruction of infrastructure never seen in any real world data and also benchmarked accurately.
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> I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
It seems obvious to me that the alternative would be a slower process for picking targets leading to fewer overall targets picked and the guarantee that a human conscience is involved in the process.
Or alternatively pressure from the top down on targeting specialists to get more and more targets selected resulting in less quality and effort spent on selecting targets and maybe leading to rubber-stamping proposed targets without adequate consideration. Which isn't to suggest that that would definitely make the AI better per se
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Look I know this is gonna sound cliche but the thing they should do is not engage in an offensive asymmetrical war and bomb a dense urban area full of innocents for basically no reason. Then they wouldn’t need the little ai.
This is obviously veering way off course of the topic of AI at this point, but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason." I'm interested in analysis and criticism of Israel's use of AI in this case but suggesting Israel has no causus belli is absurd.
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Disturbing indeed. I've been worried a push back in AI is coming and this sort of story could be a tipping point and certainly would justify a period of reflection.
And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't capture the publics attention like a sky-net doomsday happening over the civilians in Gaza.
there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless
I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
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I would strongly argue that even being able to prove that a human might perform worse is not an acceptable excuse for the reasons I will outline. The bar for a computer needs to be significally higher than that of a human.
We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.
Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.
Pushback on AI will of course have a “National security” exception. If the industrial level facial recognition tech in Xinjiang was forgotten I doubt this will make a difference
>I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think that once you start from the viewpoint that you're not going to create the Torment Nexus, it becomes a lot easier to avoid creating the Torment Nexus.
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision"
The IDF only read the first half of the classic IBM slide!
There would have been slower target selection.
A lot of news around the bombing called out the uniquely large scale and rapidity of the campaign.
This was a preview of future conflicts.
We're entering the WWI phase of new technology being brought without rules to conflicts where the abuses will be horrific until rules are finally put in place.
We crossed the line of machines that automatically kill a long time ago. A heat seeking missile, or a shell that detects and target tanks [1] are effectively doing that. Software selects the target. The soldier only points in the general direction. AI is only a small technical increment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
But you know soldiers are in a tank, and you know a pilot is in a plane. Who's in an apartment?
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Difference is someone has to fire those weapons and that someone is responsible.
This system bassicaly just gave everyone a score from 1 to 100 of how luckely they are part the military wing of hamas.
Another system would signal that target is at home and it's time to bomb. This system was using phone to geo-locate and due to nature of living in Gaza phones transfer hands often.
Without Lavender they would have dropped less bombs IMO.
Is having a human make those decisions really better? It was humans who ordered the Holocaust, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, Tiananmen, etc.
At least AI pretends to look at some data instead of just defaulting to tribal bloodlust... who's to say it can't be more ethical? It doesn't take much to beat our track record.
I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
Reminds me of that story from probably 5-7y ago. Someone wanted to use AI to classify photos of tanks as soviet vs US. So he went to a US tank museum and took lots of pictures of the tanks under every angle. Did the same in a soviet tank museum. The resulting model worked great on that training dataset. Then he tried on photos outside of the training dataset. Turned out that it was cloudy the day he visited the US museum and sunny for the soviet museum, and the model used the color of the sky to classify.
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What if the AI was trained on data collected and assembled by someone with "tribal bloodlust".
What happens when you put a computer in front of the judges at the ICC?
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I'm having to take a few deep breaths before responding to some of these comments. The difference is Accountability. A computer can't be held accountable and a person can. Full stop. It makes all the difference.
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Perhaps it performs sentiment analysis of your social media posts.
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when a computer program designed by a human "makes" the decision, humans can claim that it was "a funny mistake", it was not their fault and pretend to be very sad for it.
Having a human to make those decisions is better because this human can be judged if commits war crimes or genocide or violates international war laws.
A computer can't be jailed and this is the real power of designing this system. To hide the criminals on a black box so nobody can be made responsible
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I know many people won't read past the headline, but please try to.
This is the second paragraph:
"In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."
Yeah the AI is probably the most ethical part of this operation. The human leadership decided that no amount of collateral damage was too much.
The AI is as ethical as the humans training it.
Well yeah, they have an “unspoken” 10 to 1 rule about taking 10 Palestinian lives for each Israeli loss.
in the article they say it's explicit and it's 20 to 1 and goes to 100 to 1 for some targets. which makes it obvious it's not a rule but an order of magnitude to estimate the importance of a target. you know like when we use the Fibonacci suite as a measure for the difficulty of a backlog item during the planning game
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It sounds like you think they should have autonomy and a democratic state, which most of the world also agrees with.
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The West Bank serves as an example of that and also what happens without violent resistance:
The ethnic cleansing happens anyway, followed up by settlers.
Not having a governing body that genuinely works for their interests does not invalidate their rights as humans.
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> What can one do when criminals have embedded them self in the civilian population? Why don't they get out and meet the police on the battle field?
We wouldn't tolerate a SWAT team blowing up a hospital if the mafia had taken over the basement, I have no idea why you think this is acceptable.
> It is much better than the carpet bombing used by other nations.
It is exactly like the carpet bombing used by other nations.
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The whole point of this article (and much of what we've learned in the last few months) is that Israel is clearly not just targeting areas with suspected Hamas activity.
They're using indiscriminate weapons (so not targeting at all!), hitting known UN and humanitarian sites, and killing so ruthlessly that they killed Israeli hostages that made the mistake of being living humans in front of IDF soldiers.
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>This is no different than chemotherapy
Say that to the parents of the aid workers whose vehicle was used as a bullseye: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68711282
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awful take
Do you justify killing civilians? That's disgusting.
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They permitted larger numbers of civilians being killed in the pursuit of terrorist barbarics who raped and murdered and dragged babies with their mothers into underground dungeons, and praised themselves for that while hiding between civilians.
Why did the civilians deserve to die because of what the terrorists did?
If this is about the hostages, why hasn't Israel agreed to more ceasefires to save them?
Please stop spreading nonsensical, thoroughly debunked claims such as rape.
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You do realize this problem didn't start on October 7?
I suggest everyone listen to the current season of the Serial podcast.
>processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
This is really no different than how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo and other more secretive prisons, or bombing their location
More than anything else it feels like just like in the corporate world, the engineers in the army are overselling the AI buzzword to do exactly what they were doing before it existed
If you use your paypal account to send money to an account identified as ISIS, you're going to get a visit from a 3 letter organization really quick. This sounds exactly like that from what the users are testifying to. Any decision to bomb or not bomb a location wasn't up to the AI, but to humans
> how the world was working in 2001
By the world you mean the US, but yes you are correct.
"NSA targets SIM cards for drone strikes, ‘Death by unreliable metadata’"
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475921/whistleblower-...
Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway were heavily involved in the war on terror. Bombing Afghanistan but also arresting "suspected" people of their own
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> how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo
"Gitmo" didn't open until 2002
> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
Watching i24 news is a little unsettling. They run bits with interrogators announcing how productive torture has been, and make jokes about how it would be much easier if lemons just gave up their juice without being squeezed.
I've seen a few clips on Twitter, and it's some of the most disgusting footage I've ever seen in my life - torture, murder and genocide made into light entertainment for Israelis. It's just... unspeakably vile.
> It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home.
Okay, how is this not a war crime?
There are ~2M civilians who live in Gaza, and many of them don't have access to food, water, medicine, or safe shelter. Some of those unfortunates live above, or below, Hamas operatives and their families.
"Oh, sorry, lol." "It was unintentional, lmao, seriously." "Our doctrine states that we can kill X civilians for every hostile operative, so don't worry about it."
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine -- where Ukrainian and Russian villagers can move away from the front, either towards Russia or westwards into Galicia -- and where nobody's flattening major population centers. In Gaza, anybody can evidently be killed at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. The Israeli "strategy" makes the Ukrainians and Russians look like paragons of restraint and civility.
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine because Hamas does not issue uniforms or clearly demarcate military targets.
When the US was in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda learned that the US (generally) won't shoot ambulances. So what became the most valuable vehicle to Al Qaeda? Hamas took notes, but Israel doesn't seem to care as much as the US.
Also, besides all that, once something is used for military operations, it is fair game as a military target. Regardless of civilians. When the law was written it was assumed that governments wouldn't intentionally use their civilians as protection.
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Because it's Israel. It's also why no western country has ever really officially condemned Israel no matter what they do. They are on "our side" so it's okay. And those civilians kind of deserved it anyways or something, and we can just trust every single word the IDF says and use them as an actual source to pretend the IDF isn't into mass civilian murder.
The only thing that made this time a bit different is the crazy, almost hard to believe, switch from the Ukrainian conflict and how it was seen and portrayed... To western countries staying completely silent when again, it's our side doing it. Well it wasn't hard to believe but it just made it a lot more blatant.
Israel doesn't really care though since israeli officers routinely go on public tirades that amount to mask-off allusions to genocide ("wipe Gaza" "level the city to the ground" "make it unliveable"), with again 0 consequences at all. Even Russia at least tries to not have Russian military officers just say the quiet part out loud.
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The difference is russia is ethno absorptive and israel is ethno supremacist.
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> Okay, how is this not a war crime?
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
Some questions worth asking: what is international law? How is international order maintained?
I agree that images and footage from Gaza are disturbing. But I encourage you to think systematically about what it is we are seeing.
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Isn’t a military person a legitimate target at the time of the war? I think it is, the issue is the collateral damage. But then again this war shows that Hamas is also not following the rules and gets too close to civilians.
I wonder how accurate this technology really is or if they care so little for the results and instead more for the optics of being seen as advanced. On one hand, it’s scary to think this technology exists but on the other, it might just be a pile of junk since the output is so biased. What’s even scarier is that it’s proof that people in power don’t care about “correct”, they care about having a justification to confirm their biases. It’s always been the case but it’s even more damming this extends to AI. Previously, you were limited by how many humans can lie but now you’re limited by how fast your magic black box runs.
It's unconfirmed who authorized it but the recent food charity workers killed by Israeli bombing had a security person (death confirmed by family in UK) who is unarmed but by job description clears the way by telling Israeli authorities where the charity team is going to be so the chain of command knew who they were, so one is naturally lead to ask - who would authorize a targeted killing in this situation? The after photos show the missile went right through the roof of the car, ironically next to the food charity's visible logo on top of the car. Israeli defense minister now claims it was a mistake, although if they had hit a real target it might have been acceptable in terms of their rules of engagement with 15-100 unrelated collateral deaths according to the investigation.
Haaretz reports that the ground troops in Gaza are acting on their own and in a state of anarchy.
https://archive.is/2024.04.02-205352/https://www.haaretz.com...
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To quote someone on social media:
> With unintended strikes, there's "we work hard to avoid this, but based on bad intel made a rare, tragic error," and "we've encouraged RoE that foreseeably makes tragic errors frequent, but this looks bad and in hindsight wish we hadn't done it."
> Israel's strike on WCK food aid workers is the latter
Israel has long had pretty plain issues with its rules of engagement. Recall that earlier in this conflict, the IDF shot three of the hostages whose recovery is one of the main goals of the operation!
War zones aren't as quiet and organized as you would imagine. More so when one side is disguised as regular civilians. All war zones also have people killed by friendly fire. I would assume friendly fire > killing western charity workers > killing civilians in order of importance to the military
Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens
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I think optics of being advanced aren't the main goal. Some form of "justification", no matter how flimsy, especially if it's hard to audit how the "AI" came to it's conclusions, is the goal. Now anyone is a target. Similar to cops in the US "smelling weed" or dogs "signaling". It provides the means to justify any search, or in this case, any kill. The machine grinds away..
In 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, SVP Diane Greene, SVP Urs Hölzle, and top engineer Jeff Dean built a system like Lavender for the US military (Project Maven). The US military planned to use it to analyze mass-surveillance drone footage to pick suspects in Pakistan for assassination. They had already dropped bombs on hundreds of houses and vehicles, murdering thousands of suspects and their families and friends [0].
I was working in Urs's Google Technical Infrastructure division. I read about the project in the news. Urs had a meeting about it where he lied to us, saying the contract was only $9M. It had already been expanded to $18M and was on track for $270M. He and Jeff Dean tried to downplay the impact of their work. Jeff Dean blinked constantly (lying?) while downplaying the impact. He suddenly stopped blinking when he began to talk about the technical aspects. I instantly lost all respect for him and the company's leadership.
Strong abilities in engineering and business often do not come with well-developed morals. Sadly, our society is not structured to ensure that leaders have necessary moral education, or remove them when they fail so completely at moral decisions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan
The Guardian has this story on the front page also, they were given details about it pre-publishing,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
And, personally, I think that stories like this are of public interest - while I won’t ask for it directly, I hope the flag is removed and the discussion can happen.
This is the now-flagged to death HN thread on the Guardian version [0]
I would hope they can be unflagged and merged, this appears to be an important story about a novel use of technology.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727
Yes. We've merged that thread hither.
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It's flagged now, too. It's all so tiring.
guardian references 972 as source for report. it's not like it's "the guardian" article
Yes, that's why we merged those threads into this one. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Readers might still find it helpful to read both pieces, of course.
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The Guardian does not easily reference some random source. There is some vouching involved, especially for a story like this.
Pretty disappointing that Guardian article also got quickly flagged after HN submission
The feeling I got during the last months here when there are articles about this war is, that there are either many Israelis here flagging anything that makes Israel look bad, or many Americans, who somehow feel allegiance to Israel and think that this ever was about a good cause.
On the other hand of course there are also those that jump on any claim that makes Israel look bad. Claims of which there are many. Of which far too many have become pretty evident. Which far too many people do not want to be true and will ignore.
So what can one do? I guess keep an open mind and give claims a couple of days to be proven or disproven. Only then judge.
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The flagging on this site is pretty crazy recently
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The difference between previously revealed 'Gospel' and this 'Lavender' is revealed here:
> "The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list."
It's one thing to use these systems to mine data on human populations for who might be in the market for a new laptop, so they can be targeted with advertisements - it's quite different to target people with bombs and drones based on this technology.
The link between targeting - whether for advertisements or for death - is quite disturbing.
Both use personal metadata, and both can horribly get it wrong.
Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
I would argue that it's likely the only outcome it has had that directly relates to IDF objectives has probably been negative (i.e. the unintended killing of hostages).
Sadly, I think that the continued use of this AI is supported because it is helping to provide cover for individuals involved in war crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI really weren't very sophisticated at all and that to serve the purpose of cover that doesn't matter.
I'm starting to get convinced the stated objective isn't the objective IDF is really after.
They say the objective is to destroy Hamas and save the hostages.
I think the actual objective is to murder as many palestinians as possible. At the very least that is the actual objective of some IDF soldiers. They've said as much publicly.
Whether or not that's the actual objective intentionally or unintentionally is just arguing semantics at this point.
> Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
Their invasion of the Gaza city went way better than expected by most analysts, with minimal casualties among Israeli. So probably? Hard to compare with the alternative reality where they select the targets the old way.
That their stated objectives are likely unachievable is a different issue.
> Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
Hamas has been considerably diminished. It's not accurate to say the war has been a "total failure".
Politically and diplomatically, it could be argued Hamas have been considerably strengthened. They certainly think so.
It seems to me that Israel's overall position - politically, diplomatically, and in terms of physical security - has become much worse since the October 7 attack and it has been their own actions that are responsible for the change. A different response should have seen them politically and diplomatically strengthened.
I understand the emotive reasons for not doing so, but I think most people would consider that Israel has bungled their response to October 7.
I would call this attack on Gaza a total failure. If nothing else a failure of humanity.
It's looking more and more like the 'winners' in this situation are Hamas and the losers are the Israeli government, the US government, and the Israeli and Palestinian people.
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Just a day or two ago there was another IDF raid on Shifa hospital.
Months ago the IDF claims that Hamas is operating out of tunnels under the hospital, they raid the hospital. A few weeks later, they raid the hospital again, and again, and again, up until this recent raid some days ago.
You claim Hamas is diminished, but how diminished can they really be if they keep popping up in the same predictable place over and over and over? In North Gaza, the place the IDF has been fighting to secure for the longest, Hamas just pops up one day in the same place they have many times before and so they have to raid the hospital again.
This is all according to Israel's own claims. If Israel's claims are true, then Hamas is one of those mystical enemies that pops up everywhere and is super strong and justifies all sorts of things to defeat, while also being weak and "diminished".
I think the truth is that Israel wants to destroy the health system in Gaza and drive the people out. Shifa hospital is basically rubble at this point.
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I think they're real objectives are to murder as many Palestinians as possible, and to occupy the north of the Gaza strip. Why? Two reasons: oil & gas, and beach-front real estate. Israel has already dished out licenses to oil producers for fields in Palestinian waters, and the new "aid" pier the US is building for them is rather suspect.
Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
The world should not forget this.
With 37,000 Palestinians marked as suspected militants, it would mean they expected up to 555,000 - 740,000 civilian casualties.
How did you arrive at these numbers?
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The law of armed conflict acknowledges that civilian deaths are inevitable, and only prohibits attacks that are directed at civilians; rather than those which are directed at combatants with expected civilian casualties as collateral damage.
The legal question is whether the civilian casualties are proportional to the concrete military value of the target.
A question that's worth considering is whether, when considering proportionality, all civilians (as defined by law) are made equal in a moral sense.
For example, the category "civilian" includes munitions workers or those otherwise offering support to combatants on the one hand, and young children on the other. It also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.
The law of armed conflict doesn't distinguish these; albeit that I think people might well distinguish, on a moral level, between casualties amongst young children, munitions workers, and informal combatants.
> For example, the category "civilian" includes munitions workers or those otherwise offering support to combatants on the one hand, and young children on the other. It also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.
I wonder if you would say the same on the other side where every male or female above 18 years is required to serve in thr military and in the reserve afterwards? [1]
By your argument would you say that all of these are legitimate targets?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Israel
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Except that Israel has no business engaging in armed conflict or "war" on a territory they occupy and control. That's the only legal issue that matters. Any armed conduct by Israel in Gaza is by international definition deemed ILLEGAL. There's no right of self defense when you're the predator.
So the entire family and neighbors family.
Sure would be convenient if Hamas is 6% of the population
So why it didn't happen? 40000 operatives, x30 family members would mean the entire Gaza population is gone in a matter of weeks.
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convenient how, you mean?
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40% or something voted for them, and pretty sure all of those are considered targets now.
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Definitely Palestinians are not going to forget this.
I would extend that to the wider region.
Em, I think you mean any reasonable minded human that walks the planet.
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"Our system is 90% accurate if you don't count the 15-20 innocent people taken out for each hit". I know they're measuring the accuracy of target identification but that's laughable when used in this context.
For 100 targets, 90 are 'correct', plus 20x civs per-target is 90/2100 or 4% real accuracy.
Say you use a model that's only 50% accurate and limit yourself to 10 civs per-target, you're at 50/1100 or 4.5% accuracy!
I guess my point is that no self-respecting datascient would release a 50% accurate model, let alone one used to make life or death decisions and yet, in the application of this model, decisions made by humans about its use has made it no better than doing exactly that.
These kinds of accurate numbers of acceptably killed innocents is really hurting a specific part of my sympathy brain somehow.
"we really need to missile this guy or he will kill more" vs "well we got 37 badies and also kim and yashonda, damn i really liked yashonda"
Actually after writing this my mind went farther, "since yashonda was a good person we actually have a whole bunch of hard facts about how good a person she actually was, did a lot of help for her community and was a real pillar of helping the next generation of kids be less violent...too bad we didn't add any of that info into the kill-algorithm "
It doesn't matter if they used dumb or smart bombs to destroy the target. When their selected target entered the building then the whole building became the target by extension. Smart bomb would have equally destroyed the building. Important comparison between dumb and smart bomb is only the probability to hit the target (the building) and IDF used precise diving maneuvers with dumb bombs and avoided hitting high rises with dumb bombs, making the probabilities close. That is not the issue here.
The main crux of the story is the automated target acquisition and the policy to engage the target in civilian homes - there are intelligence errors and collateral damage.
The questions are: is the intelligence gathering and decision making ethical and is the accepted collateral damage ratio reasonable given the scale.
This is different from for example Russian strategy to target whole neighborhoods to inflict terror in the civilian population by indiscriminate killings.
The West can stop it in a moment by imposing the same sanctions as it imposed on Russia. Or in a day, if it imposes that same sanctions that Iran or North Korea are subject to.
Instead the West keeps supplying Israel with weapons and munitions.
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Upsetting how quickly the other thread was flagged and downranked.
This is a typical phenomenon when a topic is divisive, and the Israel/Gaza topic is one of the most divisive.
Edit: We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and also has at least some chance of providing a substantive basis for discussion. I haven't read the current article yet but it seems like a reasonable candidate for this, so I turned off the flags.
For anyone who wants more information about how we approach doing that, in the context of the current topic, here are some past explanations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)
Seeing as these discussions are always insta-flagged and you need to revive them to allow for discussion, have you considered adding 'Israel' and 'Palestine to a set of keywords you need to approve to be set as flagged instead of letting automation take over?
Having a human in the loop prevents bad-faith actors from abusing the system to suppress information and discussions.
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> This is a typical phenomenon when a topic is divisive, and the Israel/Gaza topic is one of the most divisive.
Kind of related thought - is there a topic you think is more divisive? And also, is there some way that this is measured officially or unofficially?
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The article makes some hard to digest claims, for example:
> According to six Israeli intelligence officers
Not 1 reservist, or 2 retired officers, or 3 contractors, but 6 active serviceman - whose day to day job is to figure out how to hide secrets.
There are more statistically impossible statements.
As someone who sees both sides of this, and as someone who didn't understand this for some time, it's important to understand that one reason a story is likely to get flagged is because users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion. It doesn't mean it's a bad story, or even unworthy of discussion, but many types of stories seem to, pretty predictably, lead to a cesspool of comments where it's clear most folks have no desire to listen to opposing points of view.
FWIW, I found this to be a really interesting story that I didn't previously know about, so I hope it stays up, and this is a story I'd be willing to vouch for.
>it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion.
I guess all you have to do, if you want to suppress information about something, is to ensure that its comments always devolve into unproductive discussions. Funny, I once read about this as a tactic for controlling information flow in online communities...
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flagging is voting to censor a particular view. it could have legit uses like spam or toxic comments but just as easy to censor narratives that isn't aligned or clashes with the voter's
im not sure what other tools exist other than a block button like X
There is a system in place for flagging specific comments by users.
Admins can, and do, prune entire branches of comments off of posts.
These two methods would take a bit more work than just banishing the topic entirely, but with topics like the first time that "AI" kill lists are publicized, maybe exceptions should be made.
> users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion
I wish people would let people decide for themselves what is productive or not...
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Successful flagging doesn't (just) disable comments, it disables discovery/access.
For a high quality piece of tech-related investigative journalism like this, flagging is simply censorship.
If one don't want to engage, the hide button isn't too far from the flag button. It's important that people have the option to speak freely and openly about this topic, since so many places shut down any conversation that shows sympathy for Palestinians and/or doesn't paint Israel as unequivocally morally good. This is one of the reasons Israel has been able to get away with this behavior for so long.
Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.
I don't understand why it was flagged, obviously it is a sensitive topic but AI being used to kill people is very clearly a HN-worthy topic
It was flagged because someone doesn't want people seeing this.
It's also currently dropping rank on the front page, despite being heavily upvoted.
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Yeah, you'd hope that a higher level conversation about the use of technology in war, pros/cons, etc could supersede personal political beliefs about this particular conflict. We don't need people's moral judgements on who is right or wrong in this particular case but it would be neat to hear people's thoughts on utilizing information technology as a weapon of war.
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Let's see how long it takes this time! I'd give it 50% odds of lasting 12 minutes.
Edit: Flagged after less than 9 minutes, I overestimated!
It was flagged in 9, but is now back. Get your comments in while you can!
and then un-flagged right after?
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I don't take any issue with people flagging a post, so long as an actual person makes the ultimate decision on whether to keep it up.
This is in contrast to how I feel about a statistical model flagging people to be murdered. That's not even remotely OK, even if the decision to actually carry out the murder ultimately goes through a person. Using a statistical model to choose targets is incredibly naive, and practically guarantees that perverse incentives will drive decision-making.
Is there any consequence for inappropriate flagging?
Not in this instance, I assume. People flagging too much can result in shadowbanning, but perhaps the mods think that flagging posts that might host heated political-religious discussion is ok (even if they don't have such discussion, and even if they are on-topic for HN).
I also don't think there is a way to complain about abusing flags other than emailing the mods; I have no clue about the effectiveness of this complaint.
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"zero-error policy" as described here is a remarkable euphemism. You might hope that the policy is not to make any errors. In fact the policy is not to acknowledge that errors can occur!
AI generated kill lists are sadly inevitable. Had hoped we'd get a few more years before we'd actually see it being deployed. Lots to think about here
They're great because the accountability for fuckups goes on the system, not on the people using the system. "Oops, the system had a bug" doesn't kill careers like "Oops, I made a bad call."
Bombing civilians doesn’t kill careers. People were promoted for what they did during strategic air campaigns.
AIs that generate kill lists that kill the innocent should themselves be put on a kill list.
Edit: And the humans who approved the list should be help accountable, of course.
Such things have been around for at least a decade. It didn't start with the same kind of AI that's being talked about recently, but there is a large automated scoring component: "Targets are often chosen based on metadata."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
Can't wait to be killed by drone strike when a GPT hallucinates my name.
Depending on your definition of AI they’ve probably been around for a while.
This does seem to be a big step more “AI” than previous systems I’ve heard described though.
How do you think people are chosen to visit a secret CIA prison, or chosen to get a 12 hour interrogation every time they enter the US?
I don't know about kill lists, but AI weapons kinda make sense.
No weapons are nice, but if the good guys don't develop AI weapons, the bad guys will.
From what I gather, many US engineers are morally opposed to them. But if China develops them and gets into a war with the US, will Americans be happy to lose knowing that they have the moral high ground?
This assumes that AI based weaponry provides value. The case in point here is showing that the only value it provides is a flimsy justification for civilian casualties. We... Don't need more of that in the US, nor would it provide a "good guy" any legitimate value.
Right, just like if the good guys don't develop a novel coronavirus in a lab, the bad guys will and unleash it on the world!
Development of tools of death is not a good guy/bad guy thing. The "bad guys" think the "good guys" are bad.
I think "killing" is bad, no matter who develops the tools.
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"Good guys" and "bad guys". Where did you learn your ethics, the Cartoon Network?
Kind of speculation at this point, but I wonder if Lavendar was involved in the recent killing of the World Central Kitchen Aid workers.
It seems unlikely based on what has been revealed about the system. It seems like Lavender is a classification AI that plugs static details about a person into a NN of some sort and spits out a score of how likely they're to be involved with Hamas. Score above a certain threshold and your home becomes a target for a dumb bomb.
The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.
This should be asked explicitly.
Morally it doesn't up the ante of course, they are already well into a genocide. But optically killing westerners, especially when they are clearly doing aid and you can't throw "they terrorist" shade on it. The World Central Kitchen incident has increased the strength of the platitudes coming from other countries. But not seeing any arms or trade sanctions yet, and no "pausing of funds while we investigate" type stuff reserved for anyone supporting Gaza people.
May have been involved, but I believe in that case there was an explicit human decision made after referring to a senior. I recall somebody quoting an official to this effect.
Getting all these reports about atrocities, I wonder if the conflict in the area has grown more brutal over the decades or if this is just business as usual. I'm in my late 30s, growing up in the EU, the conflict in the region was always present. I don't remember hearing the kind of stories that come to light these days though, indiscriminate killings, food and water being targeted, aid workers being killed. I get that it's hard to know what's real and what's not and that we live in the age of information, but I'm curious how, on a high level, the conflict is developing. Does anyone got a good source that deals with that?
When the US dropped napalm indecriminately over the vietnamese jungle or absolutely leveled dresden in one bombing run or unleashed nuclear hellfire over japan, they probably killed a lot of journalists and doctors and food workers as well. Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time. Its easy to get cynical about it all seeing how easily narratives are manufactured and controlled to serve political ends.
> Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time
Western mainstream media has been very passive when covering the current situation in gaza, especially when you contrast it with how they covered the war in ukraine just 2 yrs ago. Its just that social media has allowed people to break through the canned media narratives.
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I believe the bombing of Dresden was controversial and elicited pushback in the media, though it's not surprising that reactions may have been muted given the apocalyptic nature of the war.
The use of napalm in Vietnam triggered widespread protests.
Media coverage of the Vietnam war was one of the decisive factors in the eventual US Withdrawal, and was a key part of the NVA's strategy.
WW2 was a considerably different war in scope, origin, and patterns of escalation.
> Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time
They did and the newspaper coverage is the main reason why the Vietnam war stopped.
Most of the mainstream media has historically glossed over the atrocities, but it is impossible to ignore them today because of what we see live on the scene thanks to smaller outlets having a broader reach and social media.
It's mostly business as usual. The technology makes the brutality more efficient, though:
Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
...
By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
Using Google search, you can search new articles in previous years. You'll find older articles about Israel killing aid workers, for example. This is from 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/24/i...
The interesting thing about how this conflict is developing is that this story is full of quotes from Israeli intelligence. Most plainly say what they're doing. Western outlets may put a positive spin on it (because our governments generally support Israel), but the Israeli military themselves are making their intentions clear: https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-minister-admits-military-carr...
The weaponisation of online media for manipulating the perception of global audiences about the conflict, has definitely ramped up recently. For example, the official Twitter account of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted videos of muslim preachers appearing to denounce lgbt culture during public service in Palestinian mosques. Hamas themselves are denying their involvement in the 2023 massacre and accusing Israel of staging the graphic footage that was disseminated. This greatly polarises the debates on social media and it’s much more common now to see people who are deeply invested emotionally in the narrative of either side.
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Who was beheaded? The "40 beheaded babies" turned out to be a lie. The people burnt alive on October 7th were likely from the IDF firing tank shells at homes. Many of them turned out to be Palestinian once forensics were done. Not one of the rape claims seems to be substantiated by any physical evidence and when an Israeli journalist called all the hospitals, morgues, and trauma hotlines they found the number of reported rape victims was zero. At least here in the US the media were happy to report these lies (you know, the kind of shocking and dehumanizing lies that are always used to ramp up a genocide) and then very muted in any kind of correction.
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The IDF literally killed three of those hostages without provocation. They don't give a shit about hostages except as a PR tool.
9/11 killed 3k people
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They've proven a lack of interest in the hostages. They've actively refused deals that involved the return of the hostages, and repeatedly carried out operations that put the hostages in danger.
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My question is:
How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
And if it is behind the strategy of starvation as a tool of war, is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
How far does the AI system go?
Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!”
There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
> How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck. I don't think bigger strategic decisions like starving the population of Gaza was bottlenecked in the same way as finding/deciding on bombing targets is.
> is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
It would seem like this program gives whoever is responsible for the actual bombing a list of targets to chose from, so supposedly a human was behind that decision but aided by a computer. Then it turns out (according to the article at least) that the responsible parties mostly rubberstamped those lists without further verification.
> can an AI commit a war crime?
No, war crimes are about making individuals responsible for their choices, not about making programs responsible for their output. At least currently.
The users/makers of the AI surely could be held in violation of laws of war though, depending on what they are doing/did.
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck.
There is also another AI system that tracks when these target get home.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
I think "assassination" colloquially means to pinpoint and kill one individual target. I don't mean to say you are implying this, but I do want to make it clear to other readers that according to the article, they are going for max collateral damage, in terms of human life and infrastructure.
“The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
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> Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!”
It's not that the "AI" described here is an autonomous actor.
> During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
Obviously all this is to be taken with a grain of salt, who knows if it's even true.
> Also, can an AI commit a war crime?
"An AI" doesn't exist. What is being labeled "AI" here is a statistical model. A model can't do anything; it can only be used to sift data.
No matter where in the chain of actions you put a model, you can't offset human responsibility to that model. If you try, reasonable people will (hopefully) call you out on your bullshit.
> There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
The death machine here is Israel's military. That's a group of people who don't get to hide behind the facade of "an AI told me". It's a group of people who need to be held responsible for naively using a statistical model to choose who they murder next.
There is no justification for killing noncombatants, even if AI told you you could.
Wild that this is still a controversial statement on HN, which is otherwise rather forward thinking.
The use of AI and the authorisation to kill civilians are unrelated parts of this story. Nowhere does it mention that the AI is being used to justify killing of civilians.
Yeah, because they need to spell out what they're trying to have you infer.
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Really? I guess they're just "following orders" from the AI then. What a shameful response, if Russia did this or if the roles were reversed you'd be appalled.
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Could you say more?
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There is no justification for killing.
There are some justifications for killing. Like if you can save many lives by killing one. But in general, I agree with you.
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This is not what the article is about, and not what AI was being used for.
Read between the lines, they're trying to blame their AI for the civilian casualties.
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@dang Please consider that this is an important and well sourced article regarding military use of AI and machine learning and shouldn't disappear because some users find it upsetting.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to hear it.
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That is not the case at all.
See this comment from dang:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024
There are more comments like this from him, you can find them using Algolia.
HN is not acting in bad faith whatsoever.
This story in particular “qualifies” for what would be interesting to HN readers while taking into account the sensitivity of the subject.
I fully expect the discussion to be allowed and the flag lifted, but HN mod team is very small and it might take a while - it quite literally always does.
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I would like to know if the AI is deciding to starve the entire population and kill aid workers?
It’s a serious question, because the article mentions how AI plays such a crucial role… but where does it end?
I know the following question sounds absurd, but they say there’s no such thing as a silly question…
Does the AI use regular power to run, or does it run on the tears and blood of combatant 3 year old children - I mean terrorists?
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Should have the ability to turn off comments for these.
HN exists for us to comment on articles. The majority of comments are from folks who didn't even read the article (and that's fine).
Turning off comments makes as much sense as just posting the heading and no link or attribution.
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The goal of that being?
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that would explain the news today of how Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza [0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
Shades of https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-i....
> It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
> Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
In the case of Al Qaeda, that might actually have been true? I don't think you can really compare Hamas to Al Qaeda; almost everything meaningful is different.
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They didn't want to kill the aid workers, but the evil AI made them do it.
And they would have lived too, if it weren’t for that pesky AI!!
here's another story today from France24 about the over-reliance on AI driven targetting may have been responsible for the airstrike on April 1st 2024 that killed seven aid workers in Gaza [0]
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240403-gaza-aid-wo...
As someone working in the AI field, I find this use of AI truly terrifying. Today it may be used to target Hamas and accept a relatively large number of civilian deaths as permissible collateral damage, but nothing guarantees that it won't be exported and used somewhere else. On top of that, I don't think anything is done to alleviate biases in the data (if you're used to target people from a certain group then your AI system will still target people from that group) or validate the predictions after a "target" is bombed. I wish there was more regulations for these use cases. Too bad the EU AI Act doesn't address military uses at all.
I think anyone that works in the AI field is going to really need to have their head on straight to even be able to just emotionally deal with things like this and who knows what else to come.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to just like the idea of AI, study, get a job writing some Python, then one day wake up and learn you have quite a lot of blood (indirectly) on your hands.
Like either you need to become the kind of person that doesn't care, or one that learns to live with a lot of ambient guilt hanging around. Not sure which is worse.
Honestly feel so much for the ten thousand bright eyed, intelligent nerds eager for technology and the future. I know they will be compensated well, but that won't ever balance out what will happen to their minds one way or another.
But this is an old story at this point I guess.
Given we don’t know what it’s using to identify people we don’t really know any biases. “Holding a military weapon” probably doesn’t contain a whole lot of bias (of course there is misidentification).
Let me quote from the article:
> Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
It literally says that they use data from known Hamas members (we don't know what this data contains) as training data which is a recipe for making biased predictions. Hamas members represent a minority in Gaza (the total population is over 2 million people) and thus the real data is heavily imbalanced[0] and unless addressed leads to bad models.
On top of that, if you know anything about Machine Learning then you should be aware of models finding spurious correlations[1] in the data that make its predictions accurate on the available training and validation data and not so much once deployed and used with real data.
[0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/data-prep/con...
[1] https://thegradient.pub/shortcuts-neural-networks-love-to-ch...
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> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing [...]
Brings the Ironies of Automation paper to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless. People get bored, are under time pressure, don't find enough mistakes etc and just don't do the review job they're supposed to do anymore.
A dystopian travesty.
Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.
> war crimes trials
What is the alleged war crime in using a machine for target filtration?
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I mean at the end of the day an AI being rubber stamped or a human being rubber stamping "minor intel" for a drone strike its still bullshit.
But blaming AI is just easier than acknoledging at every step of this theres a human being Oking it, the war is Ok'd by a human, the target list is ok'd by a human, the missle launch/bomb drop is ok'd by a human, the fucking trigger is pulled by a human.
But sure because the target list was vetted by an AI its the AI's fault.
I'm reminded of [1] a recent Palantir promotional video
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU
The IDF uses Palantir’s technology, and Palantir is outspoken about its support for the state of Israel:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/palantir-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/palantir-ceo-says-outspoken-...
As a backer on the original Oculus kickstarter, I have such a sinking feeling in my stomach every time this comes up. My money went to enable Luckey to achieve this and I hate myself for it.
Luckey founded Anduril, not Palantir.
The new political excuse for genocide: wasn't me, the AI did it.
Or in the words of Shaggy…
“Saw you blowing up the children…”
“It wasn’t me.”
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It's a very complicated situation.
Genocide seems like a bit a stretch, but it is hard to tell. I would like to think that Israel is incapable of genocide, but at the very least it's clear they don't mind killing thousands of innocent people. Israel has done some truly inexcusable, horrific things.
I do sympathize with Israel. Israel is surrounded by countries that would like to see it wiped off of the map. Hamas has been attacking Israel from Palestinian territory for two decades. I'm glad that Israel exists and that the Jewish people have a home.
I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be a right answer, but Israel could at least show that it values human life.
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Ah yes, the good old "I disagree with you therefore you're uneducated/nazi/antisemite" argument.
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Continuously throw enough plot twists and general stimulation at people and they'll never have the time to consider whether they're living in a simulation.
Interesting, how do we prove we don't live in a simulation or do we care enough to know?
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Is the AI the one deciding to let all the children of Gaza starve? I’d like to know how far this death machine goes?
That's just everyday citizens
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-israelis-...
Is the same system used to direct bombing in Lebanon against Hezbollah?
If so it's worth noting that we have much better data on that campaign. We know exactly how many Hezbollah members have died because that organization actually releases that information. We have good numbers on civilian casualties. Naturally there are many different factors but I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties. There have been some notable incidents like IIRC journalists getting hit, but the overall numbers I think are significantly weighed towards military targets.
> I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties.
I wouldn't give them credit. It's a very different environment and that alone is enough to explain fewer civilian deaths. Even if they cared exactly as much as they do about Gazan civilians they would be killing fewer civilians as a proportion.
Reporting from al-Habbariyeh, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said young men were killed in the Israeli strikes that “totally destroyed” the emergency health centre.
...
Khodr reported: “This is not the first time a health centre has been hit in the ongoing confrontations along the border. We’ve seen numerous attacks against health centres especially in front-line villages and we have seen paramedics killed.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/27/hezbollah-launches-...
Any numbers though? I think about 260 Hezbollah fighters have been killed. how many civilians? 1000? 10000? 8?
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
484 fighters killed
53–63 civilians killed in Lebanon 15 Syrian civilians killed
This seems like a more than acceptable ratio between civilians and combatants in a war, no?
It's worth mentioning Hezbollah is the entity that started attacking Israel after Oct 7th and is also in violation of security council resolution 1701: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
The capacity for computers to make errors has now far exceeded that of tequila and handguns.
I'm sorry. This is so terrible that humor is the only recourse left to me. We were once afraid of AI drones with guns murdering the wrong people, but now we have an AI that is being used to plan a systematic bombing campaign. Human pilots and all the associated support personal are its tools and liberal quotas have been set on how many of the wrong people are permissible for each strike to hit. Yet again, reality has surpassed science fiction nightmare.
What the civilian mind can imagine is a mere trivial percentage of what the military can turn into reality.
"Because of the system, the targets never end."
The future is now.
The purpose of a system is what it does. :(
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Endless scrolling feed
Is there a list of congress people who support sending our tax money to Israel?
A much more concise list could be made of members of Congress that don't want to send money towards offensive weapons in Israel.
It's a vanishingly small list. Virtually everyone wearing a (D) or (R) hat is extremely interested in sending our tax money towards this purpose, which fund programs exactly like in this article.
opensecrets.org has some of it, which is used by other groups like the @trackAIPAC Twitter/X account.
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The name of Lavender makes this so surreal to me for some reason. I'm of the opinion that algorithms shouldn't determine who lives and dies, but it's so common even outside of war.
The code names for secret operations can be dead on or funny at times. I remember a few being emoji’s. It’s only a matter of time until USA or other allied countries secrets are released for using AI enhanced information.
How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?
I think the algorithm, in this case, makes a suggestion and then a human evaluates it. The article claims they've only looked at the sex of the target (kill if male) but also claims 90% effectiveness. I'm curious if 90% is a good number or not? War will always have collateral damages but if technology can help limit that beyond what only a human could do then I'd say it's a net positive. I think the massive efficiencies the algorithm brings to picking targets is a bit frightening (nowhere to run or hide now) but there's no real turning back.
People thought this way about the machine gun, the armored tank, the atom bomb. But once the genie is out there's no putting it back in.
As an aside, I think this is a good example of how humans and AI will work together to bring efficiency to whatever tasks need to be accomplished. There's a lot of fear of AI taking jobs, but I think it was Peter Thiel who said years ago that future AI would work side by side humans to accomplish tasks. Here we are.
>During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
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perhaps apocryphal quote from IBM:
it's sort of irrelevant if some shitty computer system is killing people - the people who need to be arrested are the people who allowed the shitty computer system to do that. we obviously cannot allow "oh, not my fault I chose to allow a computer to kill people" to be an excuse or a defence for murder or manslaughter or ... anything.
To be fair, IBM was directly enabling the Nazis to carry out a genocide only 2 decades before that quote.
I don’t want to talk about the war — mostly, I don’t know about the history enough to discuss it. But I want to talk about the use of technology with the intention to exterminate life. AI shows great promises to humanity, but can also extinguish it if misused.
Thousands of years ago, gunpowder was invented. This technology enabled humans to finally break through mountains and build tunnels. It enabled the beautiful display of fireworks. But the misuse of this technology ultimately leads to destructions of cultures and civilizations.
This latest development with AI as implemented in Lavender — is one that’s exceptionally dangerous. This latest misuse of technology should concern all.
We must not allow the proliferation of this brilliant technology to be used for the purpose of destruction. It concerns me greatly.
I hope that we could resolve conflicts and differences in ways that are civil.
The sad and simple truth (trying to not sound political, but it's pretty damned hard given the context) is that it seems that not so long ago, lists and very flimsy justifications were at the root of a lot of pain and suffering for the very people perpetrating the same.
Apart from all the horribleness and knowingly mudering civilians the idea of a 9to5 soldier that performs military activity then goes home to his family, well within range of weapons and intelligence of the enemy and expecting he and his family will be safe there while he sleeps is a bit insane. I can't imagine any army hellbent on winning fast would pass up on that opportunity.
USA didn't exactly have much stricter conditions or way better accurancy of their intelligence. They did nothing qualitatively different. They just labeled anyone in the blast radious as unknown enemy combatants in the reports. And USA never had to operate at this volume. I guess that's just how modern war looks from the position of superior firepower.
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Yes. That's terrible. It also proves that they are not interested in the accuracy of their precious military software. They can't make it more accurate without feedback. So the accurancy is not the goal. The goal is to have an excuse for the killing.
Monstrous. From some of the quotes alone, let alone the numbers, it's clear that Palestinian lives matter about as much to the Israeli government as they do to the machines. If this is the future of warfare we've taken a dark new path.
That seems like a very very political site judging from the other articles - also seems ai generated half of it - sure this holds up?
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Lavender: This generations gas chamber.
PSA: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
Actually, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots fired its campaign manager Ousman Noor as a result of him advocating against the IDF's killings in Gaza. The Campaign initially denied that it was over his Gaza advocacy, but eventually admitted that it was because of him speaking to diplomats which he met through the Campaign. Many members of the campaign support the IDF's arguable genocide, despite how surprising that might be.
I believe he has a gofundme up to cover his legal expenses.
The absurdity is unbelievable but it is true!
I really want to support this, but the website is pretty bad. Blinding colors, poor and sparse information, and a links to shop/donate without a notion as to what or who the org is.
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts Wild how much money we (US taxpayers) give them.
First time I've really felt like I'm living in a dystopian science fiction.
These descriptions are chilling. The mechanistic theme of efficiency is reminiscent of deathcamps.
We can kill more. Feed us targets. We can do it cheaply and fast. 10-20 civilians per one speculative target is acceptable for us.
This shouldn't be flagged.
Given how gang-flagging as a form of censorship became prevalent here on HN I think they should consider removing flagging functionality for submissions entirely. It should of course stay for comments but posts typically get flagged for political reasons and nothing else.
this means they are actually targeting the children phones at night presupposing their father is in their proximity. they are doing this because Hamas operatives probably don't take their phones to their houses.
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It is interesting to see how cell phone data was used as features and inputs to the model (along with other surveilance data). And how the models parameters were adjusted to achieve high leves of correlation. Human behavior regarding sharing cell phones apeared to create a false postive bias. Its too late now but the first thing the entire Palestinian population should have done was to smash all thier phones and go completely dark.
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Next step is to automate this entire chain. Not far away from some military deploying fully autonomous identify, target & kill systems now. The pieces are all in place. Human rights and oversight are not the first priority in all militaries.
AI system says person X in location Y needs to be taken out due to "terrorist association". Check if location Y is cleared for operations. Command has given general authority for operations in this region.
An autonomous drone is deployed like a Patriot missile shooting out from some array into the night sky, quietly flies to location Y, identifies precise GPS coordinates and sends itself including a sizeable warhead into the target. Later, some office dude sits down at his desk at 8:30am, opens some reporting program.
"Ah, 36 kills last night." Takes a sip of coffee.
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Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.
Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely curious. If everyone was as honorable as you and decided to stop working for the military industrial complex - do you think China and Russia would just sit back and say "That's cool - we didn't want Americas land/resources/overseas territories anyway" ?
This is like a thief saying that they steal something because otherwise another thief would steal it. What the parent is suggesting is that engineers around the world should agree to not make such systems similar to how doctors have the hippocratic oath. It may seem naive and can probably never prevent such systems from being built but I think it's worth a try. We have to collectively agree on systems we should not build.
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isn't this somewhat fallacious logic?
It sure would be nice if this industry had the tiniest shred of collective consciousness and realized our capacity to exert some level of control over what gets built and what doesn't.
I took computer ethics 101 about 20 years ago (that was the only ethics class on my math/cs degree plans). I learned that the ethical thing to do when a system kills unintentionally/accidentally, you stop it and redesign from the ground up from first principles evolved beyond the principles used to design the killing version.
This needs to be applied to nation-states & so much more we're engineering.
I'd love to see a design methodology grounded in accounting for all nondual needs of humans. This idea usually comes with complaints of that being an impossible task, without really understanding the issue.
Lots of us are IEEE members bound to ethical standards: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
There are also numerous other organisations with such standards.
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No, the "other option" is to realize that keeping people in what is effectively little more than a concentration camp with no hope of perspective or solution can only end in violence. Especially if you also start shooting the peaceful protestors like they did a few years ago. And then the government goes in to bed with the most extreme of extreme religious Zionists who quite literally support ethnic cleansing and murder.
That is not a justification or a moral judgement, it's just a fact that this will happen. This is what has always happened throughout history. To deny it is to deny reality.
Something Oct-7 shaped was bound to happen. You can't kick people in the face for 50 years, give no perspective for improvement, kick them harder in the face when they object, and expect all of them to forever turn the other cheek and have carefully nuanced opinions on the matter. That's just not how people work.
Current actions are not just killing Palestinians, it's also killing (future) Israeli. A new Oct-7 shaped event is bound to happen again if the current course is followed.
None of this is rocket science. None of this is a novel insight. People have been saying this for decades (have we forgotten the previous events like the intifada, the wide-spread protests 5 years ago, etc. etc.)? Some people were seemingly born on the morning of Oct 7 or something.
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> The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden
Right. Because there are always just two options when you're designing a strategy.
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> Why is it barbarism?
Because the civilian death toll far outweighs the militant casualties?
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> The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden
As if that is the only other option.
How has Israel succeeded in rescuing hostages so far? With the exception of one, the answer is negotiation.
As for the removing Hamas part, could you share an example of a terrorist organisation being bombed out of existence?
More targeted with half a million dead? Sounds like you forgot to take your not crazy pills.
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The people working on these understand the alternative looks like a WWII bombing campaign with greater loss of life
That isn't that calculus that a moral people run. We operate in the present, with the tools we have now with compassion. Unless you are the people working on these AI targeting tools, how do you know what they understand.
Not to be combative with the response here, but the density of destruction in Gaza is on par with the likes of Dresden. It's not really exaggeration to say that Gaza is one of the most bombed places since Vietnam, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can go to companies like Maxor and purchase satellite images on the open market and see for yourself.
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And now they know they were wrong?
Not everyone sees the world as you do. Given this article and other information I know about this system, I would be honoured to work on it and take a significant pay cut, as it actively makes the world a better and safer place.
Turns out one of your associates has been identified as a terrorist.
So sorry.
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I am reminded of Poindexter's[1] total information awareness project, which I thought at the time too interesting for it to wholly disappear. I must admit this knowledge influenced one or two of my own blog postings on what I call "Strategic Software"[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness [2]: https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-defence...
Related from earlier:
Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727
So much technological power, and still no approach to prevent violence and imprison aggressors and murderers instead of killing them
In the past there was all this talk of nonlethal weaponry, but nowadays it seems to be used at best "in the small", by police and not the military
Killing will only ever get easier and faster and remote from human action, oversight and consequence for the perpetrator. Too fast for humans to understand, to remote too feel
Meanwhile China is working on automated building facilities which can make 1,000 cruise missiles per day:
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1774859594747273711
Perfect match for a targeting AI, the AI could even customize each missile as it's being built according to the target it selected.
And how did Hamas decide whom to target on October the 7th? Probably not by an AI. But was the result therefor more "human"?
You're right. Hamas and Israel are very similar, and basically at the same level of criminal behavior. But I don't think that was the point you wanted to make. I guess for you it's more humane to just bomb people but it turns out that the people who die in Gaza are just as human as those who died in October 7. It's hard to believe for Israelis since they have been killing thousands of Palestinians for decades now, but their lives aren't inherently worth less than those of Israelis.
I don't like anything about this war, but in a way, I think concerns of AI in warfare are, at this stage, overblown. I'm more concerned about the humans doing the shooting.
Let's face it, in any war, civilians are really screwed. It's true here, it was true in Afghanistan or Vietnam or WWII. They get shot at, they get bombed, by accident or not, they get displaced. Milosevic in Serbia didn't need an AI to commit genocide.
The real issue to me is what the belligerents are OK with. If they are ok killing people on flimsy intelligence, I don't see much difference between perfunctory human analysis and a crappy AI. Are we saying that somehow Hamas gets some brownie points for not using an AI?
I like this point, and I do think you're rightly pointing out that the issue is that selection of targets may be done badly, not that AI specifically is in the loop. With that said, I think an important detail you're overlooking is the frictionless-ness of this process. That quote people are throwing around about something like "efficiently producing the largest volume of human targets" gets to this point pretty directly I think. The problem is not just that the evidence might be flimsy, it's also that it's extremely easy to generate massive lists of targets.
Instead of the Milosevic example I'd say it's analagous to Dehomag machines during the Holocaust. The Nazis didn't need advanced database systems to attempt a genocide, but having access to them made it far far easier to turn the whole process into a factory line: something predictable and constant that allowed it to achieve a pace and scope far beyond what they would have been able to do otherwise. Similar here, or in other cases where advanced technology is brought to bear in war. Anything that makes human death more automated is, IMO, abhorrent and worth of criticism in it's own right.
I agree making something bad easier is bad too. But does AI make the bad thing easier here?
I see two cases here. One is that the AI has some non-negligible accuracy, and one where it doesn't. If it's somewhat accurate, then actually, using it is saving civilian lives, attacking only the active enemy.
And if it's inaccurate... Then presumably whoever made it knows it, and whoever uses it knows it's merely a fig leaf for shooting random people, and is ok with that. Is it then worse to kill random people as found by an AI than to drop a bomb somewhere, because you have a hunch there might be a worthwhile target there? This is the bit I'm not sure of.
In this war, it's so easy to find the other side. If you want to recklessly shoot civilians, they are just on the other side of the wall. I'm not sure that AI makes it any easier.
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How does this system get the input? Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers? Or is it possible to use roaming towers for this? Is e.g. Google or Facebook involved on a mobile OS or app level? Maybe backdoors local to the area?
It seems like the whole cell phone infrastructure need to be torn down.
My guess: facial recognition. It's easy, if you're a male of fighting age you're a Hamas terrorist.
The social media input is terrifying: show any Palestinian sympathies (sentiment analysis) in your posts and you're on the list.
That does not explain how the IDF know that the victims are at home. You'd more or less need security cameras for that.
I guess you can do some sort of common principal component analysis (CPCA) from known Hamas persons to create some sort of cluster based on cell phone location data or call data, somewhat like Spotify does with recommendation from "common songs".
I wonder if this might explain why so many journalists are killed, since they probably call Hamas leaders and meet them a lot more than most people in the data set.
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> Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers?
That's my understanding. That the whole of the Gaza strip is essentially watched under the equivalent of stingrays and all traffic out is monitored with room 641a style taps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Hmm, I wonder if that is related to why the use of 3G barely just rolled out and why they still aren't allowed to have 4G. Maybe that would require an upgrade of Stringray-like equipment?
That is concerning even if you don't have some lunatics trying to kill you right now.
IMSI seems like a thing that need to be mitigated. We need a FOSS mobile yesterday. Especially when Elon Musk puts cell towers everywhere and most likely give our locations to Washington and by extension Netanyahu.
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Technology like this raises a moral conundrum.
Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
> Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy
I understand what you are getting at, but if you read the article this is not how this technology is being used, rather the opposite. The AI seems to use very broad criteria / flimsy evidence to decide who is a target, and then it is chosen to strike them specifically when they get home and would typically be surrounded by civilians (mostly women and children).
Their own testing showed 1 in 10 selected targets were not actually militants, but because it is statistically 'correct' (despite loose definitions of correct) 90% of the time all targets will be bombed. Add the fact that collateral damage of 15-20 civilians is accepted even for the lowest ranking militants (and much higher for commanders) who are then targeted with unguided munitions, which makes this quite a lot less 'targeted' and 'efficient' than e.g. US drone strikes in Afghanistan.
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians
I haven't been putting much faith in numbers coming out of the region since Oct. Anyone capable of giving an accurate number is invested enough to be deeply biased in some direction. Well researched sources such as this one are directionally correct. But, you can't blame me for being suspicious of a magazine I just heard of.
> collateral damage of XYZ civilians is accepted
This is an operational decision. Even if the militants were identified by hand, the acceptable collateral was a decision made by some commander. I'm not sure how 'Lavender' (The central topic of this thread) affects this.
One argument is that 'the risk of technology' and 'the risk of how technology makes humans behave' are one and the same.
The article directionally points towards a Hanlon's Razor-esque disregard towards the shortcomings of Lavender. Any time people's lives are at stake, the bar needs to be sky-high. An intelligence operative will be trained to sniff out a fake-informant or a fake-asset from experience. They do not have the same intuitions for a statistical machine, and are likelier to ignore egde-cases, with disastrous outcomes. Some might think this is because 'Lavender coaxes them into doing it'. I believe 'humans are smart enough to know what they're getting into'.
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All this being said, I repeat my earlier statement. We in the west have not seen real-war. We're applying civilian sensibilities to a situation where century long struggles have now morphed into full blown existential hatred among neighbors. US 'missions' in the middle east don't count, because they are fake wars. The US had nothing at stake. One fine day it randomly pulled out of Afghanistan and it affected the life of exactly 'zero' Americans. That's not war, that's military adventurism. The US has only ever sniffed risk 3 times in its existence. Pearl Harbor, WTC & Cuban missle crisis. Look at how it reacted in the immediate after-math of all 3, and you'll know the real face of 'American military'. Every thing else is PR and civilians happily drink the koolaid. (Here on out America = Pax Americana)
Coming back to 'real war'. What are the sensibilities of war when war is real? The price of human life is clearly not the same as peace-time. What collateral damage are Ukraine & Russia accepting as parts of their war? Look at the sheer number of deaths in recent wars/insurgencies [1]. These are mostly civilian deaths. The obvious question is - "If war is always bloody, why is everyone so caught up with this war in particular"?
That's because, Israel is unique in that it is a "western nation" engaging in war post-WW2. Western nations don't fight wars. They settled all neighborhood debates through the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. And foreign risks are crushed through NATO/American military superiority, before they ever gain momentum.
Lavendar and the Israeli military appears to place a low-value on human place. But, is this value lower than other peer-wars, or are we imposing civilian sensibilities onto war time ? I don't know. But, I dislike the hand-wavy confidence with which people choose an answer for this question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Mod...
It's not about the tech, it's about how humans use it. In this case, the IDF seems to be using tech to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is the mass murder, not the tech.
Agreed.
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>While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,”
So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.
"This will get flagged to death in minutes as what happens to all mentions of israel atrocities here" (now dead)
It maybe worth noting that there is at least one notification service out there to draw attention to such posts. Joel spolsky even mentioned such a service that existed back when stackoverflow was first being built.
Human coordination is arguably the most powerful force in existence, especially when coordinating to do certain things.
Also interesting: it would seem(!) that once an article is flagged, it isn't taken down but simply disappears from the articles list. This is quite interesting in a wide variety of ways if you think about it from a global cause and effect perspective, and other perspectives[1]!
Luckily, we can rest assured that all is probably well.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
It’s dark but so obligatory…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dub8fBuXK_w&pp=ygUZaXRzIGxhdmVuZ...
Israel should hand this technology to Ukraine. They need this more than Israel.
This makes zero sense to me, and I am a huge proponent of the defense of Ukraine.
This system has zero applicability in Ukraine.
> the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases
This statement means little without knowing the accuracy of a human doing the same job.
Without that information this is an indictment of military operational procedures, not of AI.
It is so weird that the US is sending aid to help people harmed by US weapons.
The lying media cartel put the blame on AI and you all just believe it…
One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said.
So they were having daily quotas for killings. Literally a killing machine with a input capacity of 1200 targets per day that has to be fed. Just like the Nazis during WW2
Very good name choice. An accurate combination of law and ender
+972 magazine is EXTREMELY anti-Israel and anti-semitic, so this article is written through the lens of despising Israel and Jews. Here are some of their other article titles, which you can find on their home page:
1. Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science 2. The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism 3. The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine
As such, their view is not at all balanced or even-handed. Objective truth obviously matters very little to them since they exhibit such open bias and loathing towards Israel and the Jewish people.
None of those articles are anti-Semitic.
Actually they are. The Jewish people IS Israel and Israel is the Jewish people. To loath Israel is to loath Jews, which is why you see violent pro-Hamas protests at synagogues around the world now. It is understood and ubiquitously accepted that the enemy of "anti-Zionists" are all Jews, and yes, many anti-Zionists are Jews themselves.
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Do the IDF analysts who are being interviewed also despise Israel and the Jewish people?
Yes. We have very anti-Israel intelligence officers who are politically placed on the far left. Just because you're Israeli doesnt mean that you're pro Israel. Same for the IDF (which Im a soldier in). Just by speaking to a heavily biased paper like 972 they show their own bias against the country. I serve with several soldiers who are more supportive of the Palestinians than their own country.
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Don’t militaries use statistical models all the time?
Is this any different?
do you have any examples of a military using a statistical model that names targets, which were then killed without any human vetting?
No, but tbf that stuff isn’t usually made public.
I can’t believe that this would be the very first instance of a statistics based method for finding potential targets.
I wonder if the WCK assassinations were related to this.
This is actually quite reasonable and sensible. It’s the future of warfare. People are not willing to fight in trenches anymore.
this, but in the context of Russian drones bombing New York
The VCs promised a utopia of flying cars and abundance, but all we got was more inequality and these AI death machines.
Good news, though. I’m sure the tombstones will magnanimously be allowed to have more than a 140 character limit
from what i understand, there appears to be little to no oversight on how these models are trained and evaluated.
if the markers, a la features, discussed in the article are anything to go with, it is a very disturbing method of classifying a target. if human evaluators use the same approach to target bombings, then there is no supporting how this war is being fought.
Unfortunately, Big Tech has been very effective in spreading a message that helps Israel maintain the plausible deniability that comes from a system like Lavender.
For at least 15 years we've had personalized newsfeeds in social media. For even longer we've had search engine ranking, which is also personalized. Whenever criticism is levelled against Meta or Twitter or Google or whoever for the results on that ranking, it's simply blamed on "the algorithm". That serves the same purpose: to provide moral cover for human actions.
We've seen the effects of direct human intervention in cases like Google Panda [1]. We also know that search engines and newsfeeds filter out and/or downrank objectionable content. That includes obvious categories (eg CSAM, anything else illegal) but it also includes value-based judgements on perfectly legitimate content (eg [2]).
Lavender is Israel saying "the algorithm" decided what to strike.
I want to put this in context. In ~20 years of the Vietnam War, 63 journalists were killed or lost )presumed dead) [3]. In the 6 months since October 7, at least 95 journalists have been killed in Gaza [4]. In the years prior there were still a large number killed [5], famously including an American citizen Shireen abu-Akleh [6].
None of this is an accident.
My point here is that anyone who blames "the algorithm" or deflects to some ML system is purposely deflecting responsibility from the human actions that led to that and for that to continue to exist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_and...
[4]: https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_dur...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh
I wonder if this explains why is seems like they are constantly hitting random targets in addition to everything else.
“But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
Oh, very noble of you to take on that risk, from that side of the bomb sight.
Fascinating article.
> Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes.
This sounds immoral at first, but if proportionality is taken into consideration, the long term effects of this might be positive, ie fewer deaths long term due to the elimination of Hamas staff. The devil is in the details however, as there is clearly a point beyond which this becomes unacceptable. Sadly collective punishment is unavoidable in war, and one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target.
This article below states the civilian to militant death ratio in Gaza is 1:1, and for comparison the usual figure in modern war is 9:1, such as during the Battle of Mosul against ISIS. They may still be within the realm of moral action here, but the fog of war makes it very difficult to assess.
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...
I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas, provide peacekeeping, integrate Palestine into Israel, and enforce property rights. All this bloodshed is revolting.
> I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas
Why? They don't care. They are mostly dictatorships, and it seems to me that it's good for the dictators if the conflict continues, so they can use Israel as something external to try to keep the people angry at (lower risk for revolution).
> one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter.
Killing 30 000 * 15 = half a million civilians?
That's choosing to do war crimes or a genocide, plus increasing the risk for more terror attacks in the future
Using the latest advances in technology and computing to plan and execute an ethnic cleansing and genocide? Sounds familiar? If not, check "IBM and the Holocaust".
Turns out, it, too, was just 1000 dudes in India watching camera footage and clicking things.
It's so terrible to be a human shield, in a conflict, whose life neither side values.
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"before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male"
Ugh.
So an article by an organization that is pro-palestinian (“working to oppose occupation and apartheid”) publishes a story relying on multiple anonymous sources - Is there any reason we shouldn’t consider this propaganda? has this magazine ever published a story that goes against their preferred narrative?
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Heartbreaking. I seriously wonder if Hamas expected this level of retaliation.
Pretty sure they counted on it and for the Israelis to rush in and get mauled like in Lebanon. Did not work though they took their time instead.
… normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. …
Next step is for similar AI systems to decide when to start a war, or not ...
Or to do away with the concept of starting and stopping wars altogether. Just constant AI based justifications for killing.
Wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't already been the case in Israel-Palestine already. AI targeting of Palestinians long before October 7th in other words.
Had a minor panic; I got to a final stage of an interview for a company called "Lavender AI". They were doing email automation stuff, but seeing the noun "Lavender" and "AI" in combination with "bombing" made me think that they might have been part of something horrible.
ETA:
I wonder if this is going to ruin their SEO...it might be worth a rebrand.
In Portuguese, the word for lavender, "lavanda", shares roots with the verb to wash, "lavar". It comes from Latin, and it's due to the blue lavender flowers being used in clothes washing in the past. So I think naming the system Lavender is a cruel joke, and betrays its true purpose. Laundering or whitewashing the killing of civilians, providing cover by automating plausible excuse-making. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
Bold of you to assume they won't boast about it...
I'm pretty sure this company is pretty apolitical and would like to stay out of the discussion entirely.
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> The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
Tbh this feels like making a machine that points at a random point on the map by rolling two sets of dice, and then yelling "more blood for the blood god" before throwing a cluster bomb
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Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn.
Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued.
Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing the suspect and their entire family that happened to be in the general vicinity? Is the math "one law enforcement > n lives as long as one was a (potential) badguy"?
If you wanted to do this with minimal civilian casualties, then you bring the ground forces in, block by block, and you clear things the old-fashioned way. You take casualties, but those are casualties who signed up to be "warfighters".
Now this IS inflamatory: I think we have a lot of warfighters and cops who are just plain cowards, that's the mentality. Why have a class of trained and armed people who are so afraid of dying that they'd rather kill anything and everything in their path than potentially be injured or killed?
I thought the ethos of the warfighter and law enforcement was "act as a shield, act as a bulwark, save lives, give my life so that others may be free, etc etc". Nowadays its "nah I'm not going in that school, there's badguys with guns and I might die, just stay outside".
That leads to a failure of imagination where somehow "blow up a building with innocent people as long as you got your target" seems somehow justified because you didn't risk a 'good guy' life. Cowardice.
In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.
> AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI
No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
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I think that depends on what the alternative is. It seems to me that the problem is that there's no way for Israel to wipe out Hamas without massive collateral damage. However, instead of giving up on wiping out Hamas, they just decided that they are OK with the collateral damage.
I think the concern is that the AI is making life or death judgements against people. Some may of course be lawful combatants under the rules that govern such things, but the fact that an AI is drawing these conclusions that humans act on is the shocking part.
I doubt an artillery system using machine learning to correct its trajectory and get better accuracy would be controversial, since the AI in that case is just controlling the path of a shell that an operator has determined needs to hit a target decided upon by humans.
We need to consider what are the other options in that situation, my thinking is that due to Hamas being fully embedded in the civilian population, the only other "reasonable" method is to carpet bomb... After reading the article I much prefer the AI method.
Both of these options are war crimes. I think only talking about these two options presents a false dichotomy. There are many more options that could have been considered. For example, Israel could have accepted the hostage swap and then picked Hamas operatives slowly but surely given their superior military and intelligence. Israel however prefered killing lots of civilians as "collateral damage" in order to kill a few Hamas operatives and they didn't even manage to rescue hostages. The crime lies in the blatant disregard for civilian life in Gaza.
No. That is genocide and a war crime. Both are war crimes.
No the AI was the scapegoat for IDF deciding to "target" low-level enemies, then bombing them with bunker-buster 2000lb bombs that leveled entire buildings and city blocks around those targets.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.
Any human being would not accept this. If it is happening to Palestinian people, it will happen to any other country in the world. Israel is committing genocide in front of the world. 50 years from now, some people will be sorry while committing another genocide.
be ready to be targeted by AI, from another state, within another war
what prevents Lavender from being deployed in EU or US for targeting Hamas operatives abroad ? People would get assassinated randomly and nobody would know why
Israel can freely bomb the shit out of Gaza as much as they want because it's "other" people's blocks and homes being destroyed. Pretty sure the US blanket protection of Israeli war crimes would go away if apartment buildings in Philly started to get leveled as well.
my thinking was going towards more subtil an classical means of asassination like poison, car accidents, simulated suicides...
What is the next article? AI launched a nuclear missile?
What was the code name for the AI that slaughtered 1200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage? What kind of decision making went into Hamas raping dozens of women? What kind of AI chose targets in Israel to rocket? One thing's for certain, humans no matter how "enlightened" can only take so much before they go absolutely postal. "Humanity" and "rules of war" go right out the window when humans are pushed too far. It was going on before this war and will go on afterwards. What, now that we have "precise" weapons, an all-out war of one country vs another will adhear to some kind of code of ethics? Give me a break. Dresdin bombings, Hiroshima, Nanking, etc etc civilians will ALWAYS get slaughtered 1000 to one in an all-out war.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-tanks-deliberat...
A rather opinionated site with no about page.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/
Another site covering this story:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
https://www.972mag.com/about/
Bad UX, it's hiding under the hamburger menu in the top left https://web.archive.org/web/20240401100849/https://www.972ma...
Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target?
972mag is a left-wing media and what they say should be viewed with skepticism because they follow a pro-Palestine narrative.
The Guardian (UK) corroborated all the analysts accounts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
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Given israel's well-documented history and proclivity to commit genocides against the innocent (ironic given what happened in ww2), why is this time in particular so egregious? I don't get it. Poor AI accuracy is an accepted reality not just in civilian systems.
On silver lining for those who lost their lives to his particular holocaust: These technologies in particular have a tendency of ending up used against the very people who created them or authorized their use.
Despite the horrors portrayed in the article, I'm disturbed that every critical comment here was flagged and is dead.
`public bool isSomehowAssociatedWithHamas() { return true; }`
AI
Yeah, yeah guidelines and all.
It’s slightly more complicated a.) looks like male b.) lives here c.) send unguided munition if less than 15 or 100 other non targets depending upon value of target.
I'm probably pro-isreal because I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest. (But I'm not strong either way)
Just watched someone get their post deleted for criticizing Israel's online PR/astroturfing.
Israel's ability to shape online discussion has left a bad taste in my mouth. Trust is insanely low, I think the US should get a real military base in Israel in exchange for our effort. If the US gets nothing for their support, I'd be disgusted.
Posts don't get deleted on HN, except on rare occasions when the author asks us to delete something (and usually then only if they didn't get replies).
Posts do get flagged and/or killed, whether by user flags, software, or mods, but you can always see all of those if you turn 'showdead' on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
If you notice a post getting flagged and/or killed that shouldn't have been, you can let us know and we'll take a look. You can also use the 'vouch' feature, also described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest, which is why I 100% oppose Israel's war. Israel has spent decades playing us for fools, disregarding all our concerns and making the world hate us while taking billions of our money. Here is how Netanyahu talks about us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8TxOwYte0
https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/
In another post, my comment about Act.IL and Hasbara Fellowships were not only mass downvoted, but after being killed the commenter indicated this was their intention and wished me a nice day. Felt creepy. Dang brought it back up, to his great credit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Sporktacular&next=39...
Im curious, if you’re realpolitik american.
Can you explain why would the USA support one country instead of appeasing 300 million in the area?
What are the benefits out of being so pro israel?
It is the promised land of the Bible (Torah), where there used to be The Temple to THE God. As for all the details arising from that, that's the realpolitik.
They do both.
There are two dimensions of horror here: One is that we as a tech community are building systems that are able to automatically kill human beings. It’s not only this system. I‘ve seen images of drones with sniper guns shooting everyone moving: Kids, women, innocent men. Drones flying constantly humming above the heads of Palestinians, always observing them. The feeling that death can come anytime. What a f-ing nightmare. Can we in the west even imagine what life that is?
The second is this: Why is a western ally allowed to have Apartheid, allowed to kill thousands of women and children with or without AI, besiege (medieval style) 2.3mil civilians, starve and dehydrate them to death, all the while comparing a tiny area without war planes, without a standing military, without statehood to Nazi Germany and Gaza to Dresden to completely level Gaza? To Nazi Germany that had the most advanced technology of their time, threatening the whole world? Dehumanising Palestinians by declaring them all „terrorists“, mocking their dead, mutilated bodies in Telegram groups with 125k Israelis (imagine 4mil US citizens in a group mocking other nations dead children). Why do we allow this to happen? Why is a western ally allowed to do this while almost all our western governments fund and support this and silence protest against it?
To answer your question - however you feel about Israel, if you live in the west, it is absolutely not in your best interest to have Russia or China be buddies with Israel, which either would very gladly be.
this is a horrific use of ai
I am more curious about the “compute” of an AI system like this. It must be extremely complicated to do real-time video feed auditing and classification of targets, etc.
How is this even possible to do without having the system make a lot of mistakes? As much AI talk there is on HN these days, I would have recalled an article that talks about this kind of military-grade capability.
Are there any resources I can look at, and maybe someone here can talk about it from experience.
Maybe it's like Amazon's cashierless stores that turned out to be mostly powered by 1000 humans working behind the scenes.
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This article tries to hint that Israel is doing a genocide at Gaza, which is not true.
I'm not sure what is wrong with this technology. They barely say at the achievements this technology has gained, and only speaking about the bad side.
This article tries to make you think behind the scenes that Israel is a technology advanced, strong country, and Gaza are poor people whom did nothing.
It didn't even speak about the big 7 October massacre, where tens or even a hundreds innocent women were raped, because they were Israelis. I'm not sure when this kind of behavior is accepted in any way, and it makes you think that Hamas is not a legit organization, but just barbaric monsters.
Be sure that Gaza civilians support the massacre, and a survey reports that 72% of the Palestinians support the massacre[1], spoiler: it's much higher.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-b...
The use of these AI systems are the biggest evidence of the Genocidal rules of engagement from the Israelis.
90 percent of them ended up being innocent citizens ... And they knew about it
The article says 10% errors, is it possible you’ve transposed it?
10% still seems too high, but 90% would be absolutely nuts.
I believe it's more a reference to the allowed civilian casualty rate. If they're allowed to kill 10 or more civilians per bombing of a suspected target, then even if they're 100% accurate in targeting their suspects, 90%+ of the people killed will be civilians.
How do people that work on AI reconcile the fact that the product they're working on is going to be used to kill thousands of people with no recourse?
It seems like Israel is already bombing indiscriminately, with 35 000 killed (the majority of whom are women and children). Was AI used for these targets?
History is going show a similar story to when IBM helped facilitate the Holocaust, this genocide also has people working on tools that enable it; people "just doing their job."
Did AI target World Central Kitchen or the 200+ humanitarians, journalists, hostages and medics? This is just one aspect of Apartheid Israel's war crimes.
Apartheid Israel seems to be a pariah state, if it's not with their hacking or bombing consulates, it's with the military industrial complex relationship with the US. Do they think their actions are conducive to their well-being?
> “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
US supporting Ukraine made sense, Russia was the clear aggresor.
US supporting Israel makes very little sense.
That being said, Trump signed bill to removed reporting of drone strikes by US military and he approved more strikes than Obama.
So US likely has amplified systems compared to Lavender and Gospel. We'd have no idea.
This season of Daily Show about AI comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY
Everyone claiming AI is going to do great good, solve climate change yada yada is deeply in an illusion.
AI will only amplify what corporations and state powers already do.
Annd it's gone. This post is deleted from the front page after being there for ~20 minutes.
Every. Single. Time.
HN is the new r/worldnews. Only the correct mindset is allowed.
Red flag for me is the part where they say it was left for human to decide if AI generated correct target or false positive based on voice recognition performed by human:
...sounds fake as shit. Any dumb system can make male/female decision automatically, no fucking way human needs to verify it by listening to recordings while sohphisticated AI system is involved in filtering.
Why would half a dozen, active military offcers brag about careless use of tech and bombing families with children while they sleep risking accusation of treason?
Feels like well done propaganda more than anything else to me.
It's plausible they use AI. It's also plausible they don't that much.
It's plausible it has high false positive rate. It's also plausible it has multiple layers of crosschecks and has very high accuracy - better than human personel.
It's plausible it is used in rush without any doublechecks at all. It's also plausible it's used with or after other intelligence. It's plausible it's used as final verification only.
It's plausible that targets are easier to locate home. It's plausible it's not, ie. it may be easier to locate them around listed, known operation buildings, tracked vehicles, while known, tracked mobile phone is used etc.
It's plausible that half a dozen active officers want to share this information. It's also plausible that narrow group of people have access to this information. It's plausible they would not engage in activity that could be classified as treason. It's also plausible most personel simply doesn't know the origin of orders up the chain, just immediate.
It's plausible it's real information. It's also plausible it's fake or even AI generated, good quality, possibly intelligence produced fake.
Frankly looking at AI advances I'd be surprised if propaganda quality would lag behind operational, on the ground use.
Holy shit if this is true. Who are +972mag and how reliable are they?
I can't read the news because it's so upsetting to watch the world allow a naked genocide, or discuss it with my family. The 7 Nov terrorist attack was disgusting, and since then Israel has proved to the entire world, beyond anyone's remaining doubt,that they are a disgusting nation.
So, it's a sociopathic AI, I guess, as it kills predominantely children, women, and elderly. Great job, Israel! The king has no clothes - the whole world now nows that Israel is a terrorist and apartheid state!
The most disturbing part for me (going beyond Israel/Palestine conflict) is that modern war is scary:
- Weaponized financial trojan horses like crypto
- Weaponized chemical warfare through addictions
- Drone swarm attacks in Ukraine
- AI social-media engineered outrage to change publics perception
- Impartial, jingoistic mainstream war propaganda
- Censorship and manipulation of neutral views as immoral
- Weaponized AI software
Looks like a major escalation towards a total war of sorts.
The world has been at a perpetual war for forever! That is actually quite interesting in of itself.
There has been no mass self-correction to my knowledge that would avert this kind of destructive behavior.
But in saying that, I am fully aware that most of such behavior stems from people who are in charge of the world at a political level.
Is it implausible to think that this is something that will have to change in order for the world to change?
The war doesn’t serve anyone but a few rotten minds who are trying to make decisions on behalf of millions if not billions of people.
And we share a similar nudge. I do think that was is happening in the world today is a mere preparation (of society) for a massive power struggle in various parts of the world that will inevitably lead to a full-blown war. But this is only my personal feeling/interpretation.
Judged by number of war-related deaths per capita, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. The last major conflict was the Second Congo War in the ‘90s, which killed around 5.4 million people and involved a bunch of African nations. If you want to talk about scary wars, try reading about that one.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.
I don’t see magnitude of mortality as necessarily a good indicator for the prevalence of violence or “peace”.
Let’s say, for the sake of the thought experiment, that every weekday, a small swarm of killer drones is released in your city. These drones reliably, randomly target and kill 250 commuters per weekday.
That’s only 62,500 people per year. Pretty mild. Certainly nowhere near as bad as Covid, maybe about as bad as a bad flu year, right? Heart disease kills about 700,000 people a year, so it’s not even 10% of that. Barely registers on the dashboard.
War has always been scary. We are busy inventing new ways of killing each other and there is no sign of stopping.
I'm sorry, you think this is new?
War is terrible. War has always been terrible. It was almost certainly worse in the past, but it still sucks now. Most of the things you mention were way worse 100 years ago.
Sure, AI didn't write the propaganda, instead humans did. The affect was the same.
Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do.
But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
It's been pretty clear to me for a while now that Israel's long term plan for the Palestinians is to expel them all. Starvation isnt a requirement for that, but it is probably the path of least resistance. I will say that its happening a lot faster than I expected though, Israel definitely taking advantage of the situation here.
But in lieu of expulsion, it seems they're ok with starvation and mass murder as alternatives.
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> And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
Back in 2002 or so, a friend of mine swore blind that an American had been arrested for wearing a "give whirled peas a chance" T-shirt — which is an anecdotal way of saying: are you sure you've got the full story?
I'm learning German by listening to „Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten“ by Deutsche Welle, and it definitely looks like a lot of people are less than enthusiastic about how Israel's forces are conducting themselves in war despite the constant note that Hamas is (1) a terror organisation that (2) started this particular round by killing 1000 civilians: https://www.dw.com/en/israel-withdraws-from-gazas-devastated...
Germany is also extremely sensitive to every aspect of this due to the events of 80 years ago.
Reports I've seen from the BBC show that there are significant protests in Israel, by those who consider the war to be justified, against their own government, not only for dropping the ball by failing to prevent the initial attack, but also for driving a wedge between them and their closest allies with the conduct of the war: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68722308
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war_prote...
>In Berlin, authorities banned a pro-Palestinian rally from being held.[176] A number of spontaneous demonstrations protesting the bombing of Gaza took place across the country, but were forcefully broken up by police.[177] Germany banned fundraising, the displaying of the Palestinian flag and the wearing of the keffiyeh.[13]
>In Neukölln, a neighborhood of Berlin, pro-Palestinian protesters described police crackdowns on protest that were "shocking and violent".[180]
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> But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel.
Add religious indoctrination to that. A huge number of Americans are evangelical Christians who unconditionally support Israel because they are utterly convinced that the continued existence of Israel is a necessary prerequisite for the reincarnation of their god.
There is something like a generational divide going on here. Much of the older generation remembers the wider Israeli-Arab conflict (ongoing since 1948, and arguably even decades before that) as "Israel's neighbors repeatedly invade it to try to wipe it off the map." But the last such war was 1973; even the Second Intifada ended in 2005. For the younger generation, the conflict is largely "Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors to tamp down on terrorism." In other words, Israel has largely shifted from being the aggressee to the aggressor in the conflict, and sympathy naturally tends to lie with the aggressee.
That said, there's also something noticeably different about this conflict. For the first time, the reporting I've seen in the mainstream press has generally been trending negative towards Israel. For example, the Washington Post has had a recent article on a press tour the IDF led of the burned-out remains of the hospital it attacked, clearly part of a campaign to justify why it was necessary, and the entire article was dripping with subtext of "we don't buy what the IDF is saying". And even the political headlines are generally framed in a way to keep you asking "should the US even be supporting Israel?"
Israel has already squandered all the sympathy it got from the terrorist attacks last October, and it's well on the way to squandering all residual sympathy from the Holocaust. And the Israeli political and military establishment seems to have zero clue that this is going on.
That’s not true. Within a short time of forming, all the surrounding nations attacked Israel to ensure they wouldn’t exist there. Israel’s opponents regularly targeted civilians with indiscriminate bombings since that’s what their morals produce. They planned to keep doing that over time, too. Keep that in mind when interpreting everything else.
At times, Israel allowed for a two-state solution but Hamas wanted every Jew there dead or gone. They’d push them into the ocean itself if allowed. People called for Israel reducing their presence in Gaza for peace. Doing that led to more attacks instead of more peace.
Recently, Hamas killed and kidnapped civilians on purpose. Whereas, Israel warned people to leave before the invasion where they then focused on military targets. If people stayed and were connected to those, they’ll likely die during the invasion. The OP is about people who stayed that are mostly connected to militants. OP writer pities their families but not all the non-militant families Hamas killed.
While both sides are plenty guilty, one is actually aiming for peace, focusing on military targets, and reducing civilian casualties. The other broke peace, attacked civilians, and called for more genocide. The difference between these two strategies shows that anyone wanting long-term stability with less murder in the area should support Israel.
Also, Israel is allied more with us while their opponents keep funding terrorist groups, including our own enemies. They’re also strong, economic partners. Why on earth would we ditch our friends to back people who do little for us and support our enemies?
what do you mean "bribed and blackmailed"?
On AIPAC in the US:
1. “How the Israel lobby moved to quash rising dissent in Congress against Israel’s apartheid regime”
2. “Top Pro-Israel Group Offered Ocasio-Cortez $100,000 Campaign Cash”
3. “Senate Candidate in Michigan Says He Was Offered $20 Million to Challenge Tlaib”
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2023/11/27/israel-democrats-aipac-b...
[2]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ocasio-cortez-aipac-offer-con...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/us/politics/hill-harper-r...
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There are still millions of Palestinians left to kill
After that there will be the surrounding countries to deal with. Who is going to die to fight these? Americans? After Afghanistan you expect them to come to the rescue forever?
I'm not sure this has been thought through
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For people who are actually interested in this topic instead of bad-faith race-baiting, there is a ton of investigative journalism and academic analysis of the methods of the actually-existing Israel lobby.
Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimer "The Israel Lobby"
Al Jazeera's "The Lobby"
Mondoweiss, EI, etc.
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And don't forget this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspirac...
> “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
That is appalling.
That is genocide.
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I’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Already deleted, that was quick.
If we can’t trust AI to drive a car, how the hell can we trust it to pick who lives and who dies?
"AI" in this case is probably mostly Oct 6 cell phone locations.
It is obvious that Israel has loosened their targeting requirements, this story points to their internal justifications. The first step in ending this conflict must be to reimpose these standards of self restraint.
In all fairness, driving a car is a lot more complicated and full of dangerous edge cases than dropping objects or shooting anyone within a geofence.
That's a valid point, but a terrible example because AI cars are legal in many places.
And they are illegal [in many places] because we haven't had the right conversations. We need to codify solutions to the trolley problem so decisions in bad circumstances align with what we expect.
> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”
At that point I had to scroll back up to check whether this was just a really twisted April's Fools joke.
What part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality?
There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.)
If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the overall death in a war is to use your precise weapons to take out the most impactful enemy.
Which part of this is different than how you see the world so that reading this quote threw you?
Civilians aren't strategic targets like military decision-makers, but describing them as 'unimportant' is a sign of moral vacuity.
I know war isn't pretty, but I really didn't expect that openly displayed level of callousness. Saying 'we think these people should be dead, but they are not important enough to warrant our "good" bombs', to me, says a lot about the mentality of the people in charge of that military assault: those aren't human lives, those are items on a 'to kill' list, and they aren't surrounded by civilians, but 'acceptable collateral damage'.
I'll answer for the previous post. The most disturbing part is stating main criteria is being a male and their models have 10% error rate.
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>> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”
expensive relative to what? a single rifle bullet? jdam kits are not expensive, easy to manufacturer, and there's plenty of 500lb dumb bombs lying around. If a country has access to precision guided bomb tech then I'd say the should be obligated to use it for bombing exclusively.
Its rich when the argument for the system is that the targeting is the bottleneck.
"Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination."
Hamas combatants like fried chicken, beer, and women. I also like these things. I can't possibly see anything wrong with this system...
This literally looks like any aborrhent ai "predicting" system such as the ones we've heard a ton about in the past, with the same mistakes (I wonder if they're really mistakes, bugs, or ahem... Features)
Why is this flagged?
Our premiere AI geniuses were all sqawking to congress about the dangers of AI and here we see that "they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Sounds like you want to censor information that could hurt your bottomline.
It shows Israel in a bad light.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
HN, both its community and the moderators, flag posts that generate a lot of conflict in the comments. The comments on this are especially bad by HN standards and therefore the flagging is inline with how the site is openly operated.
I am pro Palestine and not simping for Israel. I think visibility on Israel's actions matter, but HN is also very clearly not the appropriate website for a lot of politically involved news.
I disagree with this, in this issue and more broadly. Technology and hacking are inextricably linked to politics, whether we like it or not. We cannot separate the effects technology has on society and the body politic, and politics has an effect on technology through regulatory regimes, policy, and the law. These discussions are important to the development of technology even if it makes people uncomfortable to see views they disagree with, though of course there are discussions that are unproductive and should not be allowed on this specific forum.
Just as an example, the EU is setting a lot of law and policy surrounding technology right now, affecting how companies like Apple operate or putting policy into place to regulate emerging technologies like AI. The people who make the technology should be aware of those policies, how it affects what they build, and society's view on the products of their development more broadly.
I realize Israel and Palestine is a charged topic, but in my view, the high stakes of that conflict and the threat to human life on both sides means it's more important to have conversations about technology in that context, not less. Those conversations are probably going to hurt somebody's feelings, but we ought to talk about issues like how freedom of speech online and terrorism are connected and how AI systems and the military are mixing because it's important to maintaining the ethical fabric of our profession.
Anyone who knowingly developed this should be tried held personally responsible.
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Locked in a cell, to think about all the innocents their shitty code ended up murdering.
Damn, some people really don't want anyone to see this
So frustrating how easy it is for those of a certain zeal to wipe off mention of that which they find inconvenient.
There could hardly be a more pertinent issue for tech right now. Just sweepingly wild shit that we should be grappling with.
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HN has a serious problem if factual technology stories cannot exist here because some people don't like the truth.
This should be advertised. The true price of AI is people using computers to make decisions no decent person would. It's not a feature, it's a war crime.
I'm not sure why its such a shock to many to see the censorship on HN. This isn't a public square.
We are privy to the whims of whatever political views of those that aligned/run/manage/stake in YC and their policies and values.
I'm not shocked, I said it was a problem.
I think it takes a tiny number of flags to nuke a post, independent of its upvotes, so strong negative community opinions are always quick to kill things.
To restore it, mods have to step in, get involved, pick a "side".
I think the flagging criteria needs overhauling so popular, flagged posts only get taken down at the behest of a moderator. But that does mean divisive topics stay up longer.
For the nothing it's worth, I don't see this post as divisive. It's uncovering something ugly and partisan in nature, but a debate about whether or not an AI should be allowed to make these decisions needn't be partisan at all.
Which war crime was committed?
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml
At least a dozen counts of Article 8 2.b.
Only allowing 20 seconds to verify that you are male (nothing else). Intentional night bombings to increase the chance of hitting your target, but ignoring that you're hitting a residential, killing a target's family and neighbours by association. Programming in a allowable "10% error rate", which looks more like a success rate when you factor in collateral. These aren't acceptable in war. If this is news, you need to read the article.
There are, of course, many other concerns with Israeli conduct in and around Gaza.
I agree that war is a dirty process, but trying to differentiate this from genocide is increasingly tough.
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Probably most of section e.
But hamas fighters wear civilian clothes, so I'm not sure the rules even apply to them.
This is not new and dang and the others are absolutely fine with posts getting gang-flagged in a matter of minutes. Just shows how impartial they are.
I've written a lot about how we approach this. If you or anyone would like to know more, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 in this thread and the links back from there.
Complicit is the word you're looking for.
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Don't worry a lot of us are taking notes.
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Similar submission was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727
I find the AI angle fascinating, but I suppose the comments become inflammatory fast.
It's not as much about the comments as it is about Israel. Anything putting them in bad light gets insta-flagged and HN moderation is ok with this. For example, I give my own comment 5 minutes max.
Sadly you're right, our US-based peers will flag this into oblivion. Israel are the good guys, read it in a newspaper.
IDF flag everything. You just need to watch the live comments on any YT video about what they are doing in Gaza to see they have a mommoth operation going on of silencing everything and putting up lots of Anti Muslim vile.
Why do you blame Americans? From my personal point of view, we Europeans are much more supportive of Israel. The streets in western Europe are misleading because western Europe is full of Muslim immigrants and champagne socialists.
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> Is this them trying to pass blame to the AI for its genocidal ways?
No I don’t think so.
I didn’t get the impression that is the intent.
How? We both read the same article!
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This is also reported on by The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
guardian references 972 as source for report
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okay ... sure: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/
Where is YOUR evidence for such accusations?
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Easy to say when you're likely not there experiencing the conflict first hand...give ME a break
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Killing these civilians is one way to ensure that these people will be reliable Hamas supporters for years to come. Absolutely crooked that Israel is treating Hamas as though it was a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and fully responsible for them. This isn't some kind of democracy we're talking about.
Two can play that game: if the Israeli government didn't want their civilians to be killed, then they wouldn't occupy Palestine. As they don't care for israeli lives, they conscript every adult into their military, making them all valid targets.
The IDF is headquartered in the middle of Tel Aviv. Unlike them, the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza don't have a lot of options. It's effectively a concentration camp and it's one of the most densely populated areas on earth. So you're effectively saying you don't accept Palestinians have a right to resist their colonization. Just say that, rather than trying to hide behind "human shield" tropes.
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Note: The Guardian corroborated +972's sources: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
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Lavender: One person’s flower, another person’s AI death machine.
How is this not a genocide?
How are those "acceptable" collateral deaths not war crimes?
To actually answer your question, it is because the word "genocide" has a very specific meaning that is different from "They did something bad".
You can think that what they are doing is bad, but thats unrelated to the highly specific claim of genocide, which requires specific intent.
It is and they are.
Can we please discuss the merits of this article — role of AI in future conflicts — without taking sides on any of the ongoing wars?
I am going to bet the answer to your question is "No"
The issue as I see it is that the tools available don't just determine how a given war is fought, they also determine whether it is fought at all.
If Israel wasn't able to use tools like this, then it probably wouldn't be viable for them to identify much of Hamas (that's kind of the point of guerilla warfare). Since that would make it difficult to fight a war efficiently, they would be more likely to engage in diplomacy.
Very doubtful. There is no room for any diplomacy after such an attack. It would be fought with more primitive weapons and the side with more bombs would prevail.
No, probably not. When the topic at hand is the selection criteria used to justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, your stance on whether the ones killing tens of thousands of civilians are justified in doing so is rather intrinsic.
Why not both? Taking a side does not mean you are clouded in judgement on this point.
By calling it a war you already took a side. Maybe you are just ignorant, but that's hardly a good excuse.
I'm not sure that is possible. The nature and limitations of current AI technology means that it is almost impossible to talk about it without coming to certain conclusions about the party using it.
To put it bluntly, useing AI to decide on targets for lethal operations in unconsiounable given the current and forseable state of technology.
Come back to me when it can be trusted to make mortgage eligability questions without engaging in what would be blatantly illegal discrimination if not laundered by a computer algorithm.
Yes, we really should not mention that AI is being used in genocide as we speak.
Will America fight on Israel's bidding if it starts a war with Iran? Thus opening a new front with the war against Russia
Risk any American soldiers? Definitely not. Support with drone strikes, sanctions, intelligence? Already doing that.
In October 7th, by murdering, raping and abducting 1200 Israel civilians, Hamas - the acting sovereign of Gaza - chose total war. I hope this serves as a lesson to all those in Iran, Iraq, Syria and especially Lebanon who think of about repeating this.
This practice is akin to physically and mentally abusing a puppy, let them grow into a fearful and aggressive dog then say: "what an aggressive dog ! they need to be euthanized"
In war, the first casualty is the truth.
We have no idea whether this story itself is relaying anything of value. For all we know, stories like this could be a part of the war effort.
What does that even mean? 972 is a local Israeli outfit, with contributors from Israel and Palestine. They have sources within the IDF, sources who may be center-left leaning and are "done" with how the far-right coalition is running this war and they are blowing the whistle on this practice.
972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe. I'm happy they're reporting, but they have a very obvious bias, and I'd take anything they say with a huge amount of caution.
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I never heard of 972 but at first look it doesn't look neutral. Everyone in Germany knows that this is not well pictured https://www.972mag.com/germany-israel-palestine-solidarity-r...
I wonder if the name Israelis gave the system betray their intent. I noticed in Portuguese, our word for Lavender, "lavanda", sounds similar to the verb meaning to wash, "lavar". According to wikipedia[1] it goes back to old latin roots: "The English word lavender came into use in the 13th century, and is generally thought to derive from Old French lavandre, ultimately from Latin lavare from lavo (to wash), referring to the use of blue infusions of the plants." I belive it is the same root behind English words like laundry or laundering. So, naming it 'Lavender' appears to give a clue to its true purpose: Laundering, our whitewashing the mass scale killing of civilians as collateral damage from computer-targeted strikes against militants, automating and streamlining the creation of plausible sounding excuses to provide cover for mass commitment of criminal acts.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
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I expected more comments on the source’s biases, given the contentious and sensitive topic; journalist Liel Leibovitz writes this about +972 Magazine (1):
> Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine.
> And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.
1: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
This article falls under “reported pieces,” not “op-eds and critical essays”
> I expected more comments on the source’s biases,
Are ad-hominems generally acceptable here?