Israeli military’s AI tool misidentified Gaza students as potential fighters: Report
The Associated Press news agency is reporting that US tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill alleged fighters in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in AI and computing services.
But the high number of civilian killings has fuelled fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people, it said.
The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behaviour and learn the movements of its enemies, AP reported. And after the October 7 attacks, the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI skyrocketed, it said, citing an investigation.
But the way these AI systems select targets can go wrong, including through faulty data or flawed algorithms, the AP said.
In one case, an Israeli intelligence officer said the military’s targeting system had misidentified a list of high school students as potential fighters. An Excel spreadsheet attached to several people’s profiles titled “finals” in Arabic, contained at least 1,000 students’ names on an exam list in one area of Gaza, he said. This was the only piece of incriminating evidence attached to people’s files, he said, and had he not caught the mistake, those Palestinians could have been wrongly flagged.
The officer told AP he was worried that other officers, some still younger than 20, under pressure to find targets quickly with the help of AI, would jump to conclusions.
Demonstrators call for the termination of Microsoft’s Azure contracts with the Israeli army in Seattle, Washington, near the Microsoft Build Conference, on May 21, 2024
Rights groups say US, Canada violating UN racism treaty with arms exports to Israel
Eight human rights and legal organisations have told a UN committee that the US and Canada are violating their obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by continuing to export weapons to Israel.
In a 56-page submission to the committee, the organisations detailed how US military aid to Israel has “grown astronomically” since October 7, 2023, with Washington spending “at least an additional $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region”, as of September 30, 2024.
“The United States and Canada are well aware of Israel’s violations of international law, often perpetrated with Canada- and US-provided weaponry,” the submission said.
Essay Pro