Why human agency is still central to Israel’s AI-powered warfare
Members of the Palestinian Civil Defense search for dead bodies under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike, in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 21 April 2024
Sophia Goodfriend writes in +972 on 25 April 2024:
The destruction that Israel has ravaged upon Gaza evokes an analog era of warfare. Craters swallow residential complexes, whole streets have been reduced to rubble, and clouds of dust block out the sun. Israel’s military has dropped more explosives on the 124-square-mile enclave than were contained within the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. The scale and density of the destruction rivals the most devastating episodes of urban warfare in recent history, from the Blitz of London to decades of counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
Yet in contrast to those 20th-century wars, Israel’s assault on Gaza is a fundamentally high-tech killing campaign. Earlier this month, investigative reporting in +972 and Local Call revealed AI’s pivotal role in the bloodshed. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, the military used an AI machine nicknamed “Lavender” to generate tens of thousands of “human targets” for assassination on the grounds that they are allegedly part of the armed wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These outputs were then fed into an automated tracking system known as “Where’s Daddy?” enabling the army to kill each one inside their home, along with their whole family and often many of their neighbors.
These revelations follow an earlier investigation by +972 and Local Call, which shed light on another AI target-generating system known as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”). Whereas Lavender generates human targets, Habsora marks buildings and structures that allegedly serve a military function. One former intelligence officer told +972 that this technology enables the Israeli army to essentially operate a “mass assassination factory.”
The latest investigation made waves in the international press, where commentators conjured scenes of AI-powered weapons systems exceeding the power of their human operators and killing at whim. But experts in international law and AI warfare underlined to +972 that the carnage in Gaza is the result of concerted human decisions. And alongside the top brass of Israel’s military and political establishments, entire swaths of the global civilian technology sector may be implicated in the slaughter.