Israel Uses AI System to Identify Targets, Gives Soldiers Permission to Kill Civilians

You should always assume everyone is using AI.

Andrew Anglin told you that the government was using AI to do the coronavirus hoax against people, and no one believed him. Then they released ChatGPT, and everyone was like “ohhhhh, okay, I get it now.”

From here on out, with anything that is happening, you have to assume it is being done by AI.

What else would be doing it? Humans?

Why?

The Guardian:

The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.

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.

Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war.

Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.

“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.”

Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

The testimony from the six intelligence officers, all who have been involved in using AI systems to identify Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) targets in the war, was given to the journalist Yuval Abraham for a report published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

Their accounts were shared exclusively with the Guardian in advance of publication. All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, 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.

Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security Agency or GCHQ in the UK.

Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.

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.

“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],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.

“Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on 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.”

According to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.

The testimonies published by +972 and Local Call may explain how such a western military with such advanced capabilities, with weapons that can conduct highly surgical strikes, has conducted a war with such a vast human toll.

When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.

According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.

“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders would tolerate at different stages of the war.

None of this has happened before.

It’s all new.

The only thing people can compare it to is “the Holocaust,” but there is just one problem with that comparison: “the Holocaust” didn’t happen. It was a total hoax. Ask them about the mass graves. They don’t exist. Ask them about the proof of the homicidal gas chambers. It’s all nonsense.

Nothing like what Israel is doing right now, today, as you read this, has ever happened in human history.