US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
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US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
vegnus · · focus · HN ↗
"The Department of War (as it became known as), forewent it's traditional intelligence structure (the most expensive ever seen till that point), in order to have a private companies computer software generate viable targets for an upcoming operation. Believing that the software had real time updates on the current status and intelligence of the operation, as if it were some kind of oracle, the operation went as planned. Six schools, mistakenly identified as hostile targets (due to the heavy American bias in the softwares training data), were drone striked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocents. Still, the people did nothing."
CodingJeebus · · focus · HN ↗
Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?
0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
twelve40 · · focus · HN ↗
it's not like they didn't just sweep crap under the rug before AI.
did Colin Powell go to jail for lying to the UN? of course not. did Colin Powell go to jail for smuggling anthrax into a UN meeting? of course not. he just blamed it on "being misled by bad intelligence". Did anyone go to jail for that bad intelligence? of course not.
But we had to pay through the nose for decades of this shit in Iraq and Afghanistan (hundreds of billions), all for absolutely nothing. Did anyone even explain why the fuck, or was held responsible? of course not. They don't need AI to just ignore shit.