| ▲ | legitster 4 hours ago |
| > It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.” Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat. The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted. The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence. |
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| ▲ | xlayn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong... But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes... |
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| ▲ | seizethecheese 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Important context is that the notes about the changing use of the location weren’t even in a connected system. Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this, or if they would have known to check this unconnected system. > Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting |
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| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >"Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this" (seizethecheese) At the time a news outlet put out commercially purchased images of the target site before and after -- even a layman could see that it had a children's playground next to the building, and that it was separated from the compound. https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-iran-schoo... has the info from around the time, but doesn't show the detailed images in the news report (video) I seem to remember seeing. I think it was maybe some earlier coverage from NYT, they published this retrospectively - https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000107503... (which is also on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDcim48W4Io). It shows that even a cursory analysis - without the benefit of enhanced military grade satellite/flyover imagery - indicates the building targeted with pin-point accuracy is a school (eg https://youtu.be/hDcim48W4Io?t=98). In short, this seems entirely avoidable. I don't think you need any connected system, you just need an image of the target and eyes. If they trained a model to find targets and didn't train it to avoid civilian targets, and couldn't be bothered to have anyone check them, that's still a war crime. The analyst could probably see the kids playing there with the imaging tech they have available. This war was unlawfully started by the military at Trump's command, knowing it was not a lawful order; just as they knew firing on shipwrecked civilian sailors was murder. Seemingly it was started to win money betting on fuel prices. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The discussion is mostly about AI being evil. Humans, even the very large amounts of humans the US military employees, are fundamentally limited in capacity. So the odds of them seeing this sort of image, and canceling the targeting information are approaching a constant (and that constant is not 0) Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero. |
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| ▲ | beloch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error." ------------------- Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage. Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive. |
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| ▲ | cgio an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that’s the important distinction. Mistakes under pressure do happen. Unnecessary pressure is not a mistake, though, it’s a crime in this context. They could start planning earlier or commit to action later. | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well the order wasn't lawful, Congress hadn't countenanced a war. Unfortunately the military all turned their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution (Again! Deploying against USA cities and kidnapping foreign heads-of-state at the whim of Trump is also not lawful). At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected. | |
| ▲ | rurp 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Great point. Less deadly but just as incompetent was the utter failure to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when gas was cheap for a year leading up to this war of choice; a war that was certain to massively disrupt global energy markets. Energy disruptions had been an obvious consequence to every expert and non-expert who had looked at attacking Iran for decades. Yet the people who chose to start the war managed to be caught completely off guard by that. Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage. These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike. |
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| ▲ | jmathai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs. |
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| ▲ | jauntywundrkind 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must must never make a management decision" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be... Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people. |
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| ▲ | bix6 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit... |
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| ▲ | legitster 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” - Hegseth ... > Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is. | | |
| ▲ | andrepd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic. | | | |
| ▲ | noncoml 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not sure wtf “politically correct” in the context of rules of engagement even means. What a fucking moron | | |
| ▲ | folkrav 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Politically correct for this type of ultra-religious zealot just means things they don't believe in. I don't believe he thinks of the children of muslims as real people. The guy is a fanatic who is, from his point of view, on a literal crusade for America. | |
| ▲ | cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Instead of worrying about woke things like "is this person actually a combatant actively fighting" they want the much simpler rule of "everyone we kill was actually a terrorist that deserves to die". Basically they stopped caring those woke UN rules about war crimes. | | |
| ▲ | toyg 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Hey, it's worked for a certain allied country in the Middle East for decades at this point... |
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| ▲ | michaelmrose 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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