The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.

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 — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. 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.

The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.

  • TommySoda@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    I don’t even trust AI to give me factual information about common flowers found in my state. So why the fuck are people using it to make decisions about killing people?

    I have a few theories.

    Either these guys are dumb enough to believe AI is actually smart, which it isn’t. AI gives you information based off of what it knows. The problem is that AI still doesn’t have the capability to fact check itself. It has no idea what’s real or isn’t real. If it’s fed bullshit information it will provide bullshit answers. Which comes to my second theory…

    They purposely fed it false information to get the information they wanted. Like confirmation bias but for AI. I’ve messed around with a bunch of different AI over the course of this new craze and with pretty much every single one you can get the information you want if you brute force your way into giving it to you. It’s not even that hard in some circumstances. Scale that up to an AI being used to come up with military targets and you got yourself a golden ticket to do whatever you want and just blame the AI. Which brings me to my third theory…

    It’s bullshit. They are just blaming AI so they can say it isn’t their fault while also continuing to do what they are doing. It’s like saying your dog ate your homework. It’s a shitty excuse and no one will believe you, but now you can just blame everything on the dog and feel better about doing it again and again.

    This whole thing just stinks of more excuses as to why they are literally committing genocide. The rules may be different, but you’re doing the exact same shit as everyone else that has done genocide. Maybe just don’t murder innocent people just trying to stay alive.