Intelligence officials reveal that Israel has used and is using an AI program to identify targets and estimate civilian casualties
“Everyone, including me, has lost someone October 7. The machine did it coolly and made things easier,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said a few hours ago.
Israel is apparently using an artificial intelligence-powered database called “Lavender”, to identify with precise coordinates 37,000 potential targets who had dealings with Hamas. The news comes from a “high intelligence source” which was later partially denied. One officer said: “At this stage I invested 20 seconds in each objective, and I did dozens of them every day. I had no added value as a human other than being a stamp of approval. I saved a lot of time.”
Adnkronos reports that: “Testimony from six intelligence officers, all involved in using AI to identify Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets, was given to the journalist Yuval Abraham for an article published in the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 Magazine and for the Hebrew-language site Local Call and shared in advance with the Guardian. Lavender was developed by the Israeli Defense Force's elite intelligence division, Unit 8,200, which is comparable to the US National Security Agency or the UK's GCHQ.”
“The specific program of Artificial intelligence allows you to enter pre-authorized thresholds of permitted civilian casualties. It was possible to kill 15 to 20 civilians per attack if the militants were low-ranking.” Another intelligence officer clarified further: “You don't want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people, it's very expensive for the country and there is a shortage (of these bombs).” Apparently the objectives are constantly being generated and there are another 36,000 new ones waiting. What is striking, moving forward in the interview, is that after 7 October the use of AI it has become structural and fundamental and has essentially replaced the human decision maker who had the task of ratifying the action every 20 seconds.
As we said Israel partially denied in a statement: “The process of identifying military targets in the IDF consists of various types of tools and methods, including information management tools, which are used to help intelligence analysts collect and analyze intelligence obtained from a variety of sources”. But the admission of the use of AI remains, even if not as a half-prince, but this was obvious. A new phase therefore in the development and application of AI, in this case in the military field. That it was used was suspected but no one had ever confirmed it at this level of authority.
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