Comment by keyle
15 hours ago
It's pretty safe to say that AI will be used on the battlefield making real life and death decisions before it will be able to render a decent pelican on a bike in SVG.
15 hours ago
It's pretty safe to say that AI will be used on the battlefield making real life and death decisions before it will be able to render a decent pelican on a bike in SVG.
It already has been and this has been widely written about. AI was used to identify and prioritize targets for the US to bomb in Iran.
Here's an article from 2 months ago for example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/ma...
It was also implicated in the bombing of a girls elementary school which left 168 dead. The US did a "triple tap" to kill any first responders.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/dont-blam...
I read the article and it doesn’t say it was used for targeting or prioritizing?
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English
There’s a lot of humans in that loop who make those decisions.
Yeah militaries don't use commercial chatbots for that, they have their own machine learning implementations. Look into Project Maven for example.
And while there are still humans in the loop, the impression I get is that this is increasingly becoming meaningless, from the way they talk about optimizing the "kill chain" and letting small teams make hundreds of targeting decisions per hour.
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First link says
> AI is ‘identifying and prioritising targets, recommending weaponry and evaluating legal grounds for a strike’.
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I think it's beyond decent. I don't understand how people are not more impressed by this. Just a few years ago the only expectation would be garbled nonsense.
Haha, yeah. I tried for it to create a SVG with scissors and it was hopelessly overwhelmed. I think at least the SVG design niche will be safe a little while longer
the battlefield sounds much easier. worst case scenario you kill somebody, but that's what you're trying to do anyways.
if you kill somebody while trying to render a pelican on a bicycle it's a real problem.
In many battlefield scenarios, there is more than one "somebody" on it. The "somebody" that you kill might not be the "somebody" that you intended to kill.
Depending on the how pelicans are created, it is entirely possible to indirectly kill "somebody" due to the externalised costs of global warming etc.
"shift left" on the battlefield. break down those silos. if you have to ask for permission it's already too late. remember the goal. find the bottlenecks in your system and remove them.
I think that's a fair tradeoff. There's no way I'm going back to writing code by hand again. No one deserves that.
Heh? How long were you writing "code by hand" before?
Years and years. It was horrible. No number of misidentified targets will make me go back.
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