AI & WARGaza War: Israel Using AI to Identify Human Targets Raising Fears That Innocents Are Being Caught in the Net
A new report finds that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying – and potentially misidentifying – tens of thousands of targets in Gaza. This suggests that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. It is already here and the consequences are horrifying.
A report by Jerusalem-based investigative journalists published in +972 magazine finds that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying – and potentially misidentifying – tens of thousands of targets in Gaza. This suggests that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. It is already here and the consequences are horrifying.
There are two technologies in question. The first, “Lavender”, is an AI recommendation system designed to use algorithms to identify Hamas operatives as targets. The second, the grotesquely named “Where’s Daddy?”, is a system which tracks targets geographically so that they can be followed into their family residences before being attacked. Together, these two systems constitute an automation of the find-fix-track-target components of what is known by the modern military as the “kill chain”.
Systems such as Lavender are not autonomous weapons, but they do accelerate the kill chain and make the process of killing progressively more autonomous. AI targeting systems draw on data from computer sensors and other sources to statistically assess what constitutes a potential target. Vast amounts of this data are gathered by Israeli intelligence through surveillance on the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza.
Such systems are trained on a set of data to produce the profile of a Hamas operative. This could be data about gender, age, appearance, movement patterns, social network relationships, accessories, and other “relevant features”. They then work to match actual Palestinians to this profile by degree of fit. The category of what constitutes relevant features of a target can be set as stringently or as loosely as is desired. In the case of Lavender, it seems one of the key equations was “male equals militant”. This has echoes of the infamous “all military-aged males are potential targets” mandate of the 2010 US drone wars in which the Obama administration identified and assassinated hundreds of people designated as enemies “based on metadata”.
What is different with AI in the mix is the speed with which targets can be algorithmically determined and the mandate of action this issues. The +972 report indicates that the use of this technology has led to the dispassionate annihilation of thousands of eligible – and ineligible – targets at speed and without much human oversight.
