Do you think a LLM wrote the target selection list that led the US military to obliterate a girl’s elementary school (which was an IRGC base up until 15 years ago)? Did an AI agent distally cause the killing/maiming/lifelong traumatization of hundreds of civilians, including children?
Maybe? Seems like the sort of mistake a human could have made just as easily though? You have a map, the map lists the site as an IRGC base, you don’t know that the map is out of date. Whoever’s job it was to keep the map up to date didn’t notice the news reports (if any existed) about the change of status of the building.
It seems like the kind of thing that could happen if you make an AI synthesize a target list by first querying a database that happens to include both contemporaneous as well as outdated intelligence on some subject.
I’m mostly being silly, but one might claim this is a Freudian slip: Hegseth referred to “civilian targets”, as of this is one of kinds of targets in discussion. Like that is a phrase he’s been using. He could have referred to them as civilians, but he referred to them as targets. Source
Do you think a LLM wrote the target selection list that led the US military to obliterate a girl’s elementary school (which was an IRGC base up until 15 years ago)? Did an AI agent distally cause the killing/maiming/lifelong traumatization of hundreds of civilians, including children?
Maybe? Seems like the sort of mistake a human could have made just as easily though? You have a map, the map lists the site as an IRGC base, you don’t know that the map is out of date. Whoever’s job it was to keep the map up to date didn’t notice the news reports (if any existed) about the change of status of the building.
It seems like the kind of thing that could happen if you make an AI synthesize a target list by first querying a database that happens to include both contemporaneous as well as outdated intelligence on some subject.
the important part is that counterfactually it also seems like the kind of thing that could happen if you make a human synthesize a target list etc
I’m mostly being silly, but one might claim this is a Freudian slip: Hegseth referred to “civilian targets”, as of this is one of kinds of targets in discussion. Like that is a phrase he’s been using. He could have referred to them as civilians, but he referred to them as targets. Source