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AI The Military

How AI-Based Military Intelligence Powered Israel's Attacks on Gaza (msn.com) 116

It's "what some experts consider the most advanced military AI initiative ever to be deployed," reports the Washington Post.

But the Israeli military's AI-powered intelligence practices are also "under scrutiny. Genocide charges against Israel brought to The Hague by South Africa question whether crucial decisions about bombing targets in Gaza were made by software, an investigation that could hasten a global debate about the role of AI technology in warfare." After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group. But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war's breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or "the Gospel" — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets. The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF's target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF's intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel's 14-month war in Gaza... People familiar with the IDF's practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel's military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms. Some argue this shift is enabled by automation, which has made it easier to speedily generate large quantities of targets, including of low-level militants who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.
In a statement to The Post, the IDF argued that "If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process." The IDF requires an officer to sign off on any recommendations from its "big data processing" systems, according to an intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Israel does not release division leaders' names. The Gospel and other AI tools do not make decisions autonomously, the person added...Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer...

Another machine learning tool, called Lavender, uses a percentage score to predict how likely a Palestinian is to be a member of a militant group, allowing the IDF to quickly generate a large volume of potential human targets... The rule mandating two pieces of human-derived intelligence to validate a prediction from Lavender was dropped to one at the outset of the war, according to two people familiar with the efforts. In some cases in the Gaza division, soldiers who were poorly trained in using the technology attacked human targets without corroborating Lavender's predictions at all, the soldier said.

The article includes an ominous quote from Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who researches the use of AI in war. Feldstein acknowledges questions of accuracy, but also notes the accelerated speed of the systems, and the ultimate higher death count. His conclusion?

"What's happening in Gaza is a forerunner of a broader shift in how war is being fought."

How AI-Based Military Intelligence Powered Israel's Attacks on Gaza

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  • You need AI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @04:52PM (#65062215) Journal

    To target tents and children? Hm, ok. Don't forget: RUSSIA BAD, VERY BAD.

    • Re:You need AI (Score:5, Insightful)

      by evanh ( 627108 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:12PM (#65062245)

      AI, the tool to wash hands of genocidal hypocrisy.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, at least as a story to tell us grow great AI is, this is an abysmal failure. Seems the AI cheerleaders are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        Would any other country not keep fighting when hundreds of its hostages were still not released? Would any country not fight until the war was won if a significant percent of its population was killed in a surprise attack?

        • Re:You need AI (Score:5, Insightful)

          by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Sunday January 05, 2025 @10:45AM (#65063747)

          Um, plenty of countries end up with their citizens as hostages and don't start a war over it. History is full of it happening.

          The real problem isn't that Israel took military action though. The real problem is Israel's very long history of antagonism towards the Palestinians via the seizing of their territory and turning a blind eye towards violent attacks against them performed by the Israeli military and civilians, their complete lack of any kind of long term plan on how to deal with the Palestinians, and their incredibly aggressive tactics and indiscriminate use of large unguided bombs in one of the most densest populated parts of the world during this conflict that have resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties.

          There's also the whole starving and malnourished children angle as pretty much every major international food aid program has pointed out Israel is creating a hell of a lot of hard ship for Palestinian civilians by not letting enough food aid in

          • by piojo ( 995934 )

            I don't deny that Israel has issues with how it treated Palestinians in the past. Not everything you mentioned is correct. If Israel actually weren't allowing necessary aid, why wouldn't aid organizations just send it through Egypt? But on the other hand, Hamas uses aid to buy or make weapons instead of helping the people. For example, pipes become rockets, which are then launched at Israeli cities.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      To target tents and children? Hm, ok. Don't forget: RUSSIA BAD, VERY BAD.

      Amplifying the OP.
      Israel is a terrorist state at least as much as Russia is, and in a world where there's actual justice, they should be sanctioned into oblivion at least as much as we're currently doing to Russia -- if not just bombed out of existence.
      Now, they're doing land-grabs in Syria, taking advantage of the power-vacuum left by the departure of that butcher Assad. Literally kicking people out of their homes [aljazeera.com], and in some cases bulldozing dwellings.
      Oh and by the way good luck finding anything about

      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        At least link to a neutral source like BBC or Reuters. Al Jazeera is literally a propaganda publication.

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:02PM (#65062227)

    the IDF argued that "If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process."

    The repeated, deliberate bombing of schools [bbc.com], refugee camps [apnews.com], hospitals, safe zones [nbcnews.com], and apartment [latimes.com] blocks [pbs.org] only shows the accuracy of Israel's genocide. At least 146 journalists have been killed [cpj.org] so far in and around Gaza. I say around because it's funny how often Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages strike fully identified media personnel in Palestine and Lebanon.

    The lies continue and the U.S. does nothing. If Israel can commit genocide, why should care about the Holocaust?

    • short of putting boots on the ground, which voters won't back.

      Folks think we can threaten to pull our aid, but it's about 1% of their GDP, 2% if you include all the non military aid. They can tell us to go pound sand and buy weapons from Germany, France or even India/China.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        short of putting boots on the ground, which voters won't back.

        We put UN boots on the ground. The IDF shot at them anyway.

      • France won't sell them, and Germany has supply issues for its own army and Ukraine. Politically it would be suicidal for Germans government to send arms to Israel right now.

        As for buying weapons from China, I'm not sure Israel would want to depend on that, nor would China like to antagonise countries that are turning to them over this specific issue.

        The only candidate is India, no stranger to genocide themselves. Yeah, good PR. I don't think they would do that.

    • Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:39PM (#65062285)

      As a follow up, I forgot to mention that Israel has allocated $150 million [jewishinsider.com] (most likely U.S. taxpayer money) to convince the world [timesofisrael.com] it's not really committing genocide in Palestine.

    • Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:50PM (#65062313)
      I don't even know why I'm getting involved with this discussion as I don't care about either side. They've hated and wanted to kill each other long before I was born and will continue to long after I'm dead. If Israel wanted to commit genocide as you claim, why are they doing such a poor job of it? You throw the Holocaust into your argument as if it were in any way comparable to the present conflict beyond the simple fact that both involve the Jews. Most reporting puts the death toll (civilians and combatants) at around 50,000. For point of comparison, the Hutu killed over ten times as many in an under a quarter of the time with afar less capable military.

      I don't think Israel particularly cares if civilians die and aren't as careful as they could be with their operations, but if the could have leveled Gaza within weeks if they had wanted to. Frankly, the U.S. shouldn't do anything and should stay the hell out of it. Of course tax dollars are being funneled into military funding and more will eventually be funneled into rebuilding afterwards, but it's just an excuse to rob the taxpayers to reward donors as opposed to anyone actually caring about either side. And ultimately nothing will change and we'll be left in the same situation as before waiting for the next round of hostilities to flare up so more money can be funneled from the pockets of the tax payer into the pockets of the few.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        You throw the Holocaust into your argument as if it were in any way comparable to the present conflict beyond the simple fact that both involve the Jews.

        Perhaps appropriate since that's what Israel does when faced with any criticism.
        But that's typical of Israel: outraged at everything, yet ashamed of nothing.

      • They've hated and wanted to kill each other long before I was born and will continue to long after I'm dead.

        Says 'ONN Future News' and damn if things don't seem to be headed that way: https://youtu.be/iKC21wDarBo?s... [youtu.be]

      • Yes, it isn't genocide; it's more accurately "total war" (the kind of war where infrastructure is fair game and civilians are somewhere between expendable and targets-of-opportunity. after all, eventually they'll learn to go away, so why not help them with bullets?).

        Americans, though, don't care about that; to us, war is total war, be it Dresden, Fallujah, or Savannah. "Genocide" just catches our jaded attention lol.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Israel is still trying to pretend that it's not a genocidal state. It seems they were hoping that the population of Gaza would be forced over the border, so they wouldn't have to kill all of them.

        An example of this pretence is TFA. Their "AI" is just "if target within Gaza send bomb". At most they use some image recognition to hit high value targets like ambulances and refugee camps. "Computer said do a war crime, we are investigating ourselves" is their go-to excuse.

  • You canâ(TM)t charge an AI with a war crime. As the old saying goes âoeitâ(TM)s never a war crime the first time!â
  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:46PM (#65062301)

    So they claim that without AI they would have killed even more innocent bystanders? Or did it even more painful and unpleasant for them? That hardly seems possible. Well, it is mass-murdering religious fanatics on one side and mass-murdering religious fanatics on the other. And a lot of civilians in the middle that did not ask for this and basically have no choice in being there.

    The main difference between doing genocide and terrorism is that genocide is usually better organized and kills a lot more people. As can be seen nicely in the case at hand. The instigators, coordinators and executors are operating pretty much on the same moral level in both cases though, namely one where it is hard to sink any lower.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The instigators, coordinators and executors are operating pretty much on the same moral level in both cases though, namely one where it is hard to sink any lower.

      Same goes for the person that modded me down, incidentally. Apologizing mass-murder is not that much better than doing it.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Sunday January 05, 2025 @03:52AM (#65063203)

      Genocide and terrorism are two different concepts.
      Genocide is killing. Terrorism is about using massive violence to break down people's morale for political gain.

      What Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide and terrorism.

      Israel's goal here is to create the conditions that will give them an excuse to continue committing genocide.
      The AI tells them where to bomb: so they can blame the AI when innocents get killed.
      The killing of innocents instigate more resistance: to keep the hostilities going.
      And the cycle repeats, ... until Gaza's population is insignificant and under control, and Israeli settlers can move in.

  • by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:48PM (#65062307)
    That you dont become one yourself, - Nietzsche

    Israel has become the monster
    • It's funny how many Israeli laws are modeled after German laws of the 1930s and 1940s.

    • Imagine if Mexico killed 1000 and kidnapped 100 Americans. Imagine that they broadcast videos of torturing those Americans for a full year. I don't think you can even imagine how much death US would rain down in that situation, and I don't think you would complain when they did.

  • This is the most piss poor genocide ever enacted in all of human history.

    Others have killed far more people, much faster, with much lower tech and military capabilities than Israel has in Gaza.

    It's been almost 1.5 years and even the Hamas PR guys only claim about 40k total dead out of millions of defenseless targets. The IDF are completely incompetent.

    The Hutu managed to slaughter 800k Tutsi in only 100 days with nothing but machete. wtf? The IDF need to hire those guys to do this genocide thing for them

  • fuck... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 )

    ... The Hague, and fuck South Africa on this.

    If Gaza didn't like it, they could have returned the hostages at *any* moment.

    They were all celebrating hard enough around the pickup trucks with the dead bodies of abused girls in October 7. And the UN/West enabled this with literal torrents of unsupervised money for decades which could have made Gaza a wonderful place, but instead bought bunkers and rockets and guns.

  • Makes you safer.
    I read that. Yep, the CEO of the company said that. He had his factoids and figures worked out. Will sell like hotcakes and syrup. Who doesn't want to be safer??
  • Machine before man. Does your God approve?

  • Those tools must be mediocre, if after over a year after being attacked Israel have not dealt with all the terrorists. Israel actions looks like normal, although not very effective, conventional warfare.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday January 05, 2025 @06:55AM (#65063415)

    "People familiar with the IDF's practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel's military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms."

    in over 42,000 bombed targets in 400 days, the "Hamas Health Ministry" (sic) claims about 45000 dead, INCLUDING every single dead terrorist.

    If one assumes that Israel does not bomb empty houses but terrorist-occupied ones and if one assumes that at least ONE terrorist was targeted in each bombing, that leaves about 0.1 civilian casualties according to my numbers.

    Perhaps somebody can show me the error of my way to calculate or maybe Israel IS bombing ONLY empty houses, then it's a bit over 1 (ONE) civilian deaths per target bombed.

"When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.'" -- David Parnas

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