Comments on: How a Culture Shift in the Israeli Military Helps Explain Gaza’s Death Toll

By: penny2

penny2 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 12:06:24 +0000

In reply to Kaz.

Hey Kaz

The AI is the Lavender System

“the Israeli army developed an artificial intelligence-based program named Lavender, designed to identify targets for assassination”
“The deployment of Lavender contributed to the deaths of around 15,000 Palestinians in the war’s first six weeks”

Lavender was used when the humanitarian workers were killed.
There seems to be this attempt to blame the AI for all the civilian deaths, but, from my reading, yes I believe these killings were still supposed to be validated and were validated by humans.

The media spin is attempting to portray the killings as the cold calculated death by AI, rather than the IDF and Israeli policies

By: Kaz

Kaz — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:27:48 +0000

In reply to penny2.

Wait what, Are they blaming AI ?

That is some next-level pulling the wool over your eyes. I am not fully versed in the type of AI they are using, but can’t be more than some sort of pattern matching with data from multiple sources.

And this process is not perfect, because you can’t account for all the edge cases etc. (I doubt they even tried to calibrate for 100% certainty)

But in the end I suspect in these cases, the target should still be validated by an officer. It this is not done and they only have yes-man. Than the responsibility lies on the office and officers. (And the developers of that AI, because they most have convinced someone to get funded to build such a system)

By: penny2

penny2 — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:15:43 +0000

In reply to Mark Finnegan.

I think you hit the nail on the head Mark!

1-The object of warfare is always the destruction of the opponents will to resist by causing casualties.

2 This ‘shift’ in language indicates a lack of strategic success or an absence of clear, achievable strategic goals.

3-This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’ is but the extension of war propaganda designed to emulate conquest and buttress morale on the ‘home front’, both ‘national’ and ‘international’ and in the army.

I’ve been having troubles with the let’s blame AI for what going on. (This came out after the very obvious and intentional killing of the aid workers)
It felt like a way to shift blame from human to machine-

“This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’”

See there it is. The culture shift that makes clear there is no humanitarianism involved and yet makes it okay to keep up the killing.
I don’t like it. It has very bad, broader ramifications

By: Mark Finnegan

Mark Finnegan — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:27:26 +0000

This ‘culture shift’ in the IDF appears to be but an exercise in semantics. The object of warfare is always the destruction of the opponents will to resist by causing casualties. The stated goal was the elimination of Hamas fighters but since progress on that goal is hard to achieve and harder to document there is a shift to the supposed tabulation of overall population casualties in the expectation that these will adversely effect the opponent’s will to fight. This ‘shift’ in language indicates a lack of strategic success or an absence of clear, achievable strategic goals.
It was the same with the US in the Vietnam war where lack of strategic vision and advances turned the narrative into one defining ‘progress’ as grinding attrition in the pursuit of ‘victory’ through enemy exhaustion. It didn’t work there and won’t work now where the strength of the human spirit to resist is greater than the cumulative impact of military hardware and the resulting casualties.
This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’ is but the extension of war propaganda designed to emulate conquest and buttress morale on the ‘home front’, both ‘national’ and ‘international’ and in the army.