Tag: ai

Genocide profiteer IBM wins big on EU funding

Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza during the current genocide has garnered many headlines.

Few who have paid close attention to how Israel tests new technology on Palestinians can be surprised. Israel had previously signaled that its May 2021 attack on Gaza gave it an opportunity to experiment with AI.

The proper response to those signals would have been to halt any funding of AI research involving Israeli firms and institutions. The European Union has taken the opposite approach.

In September 2023, the EU authorized a project aimed at realizing a future in which collaboration between humans and AI “takes center stage.”

Participants in the project include IBM Israel – a subsidiary of the US-based giant.

IBM has a long and ignoble history of providing technology to abusers of human rights. Among its past clients were the German government during the Nazi era and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

More recently, IBM has been awarded a series of contracts to run technology support centers for the Israeli military. Robotics are a core feature of the latest such center.

It is a near certainty that IBM products can be found in Israel’s toolbox during the current genocide.

No questions about IBM’s ties to the Israeli military seem to have been asked by EU officials before they rubber-stamped the aforementioned project in September.

I have seen a copy of an “ethics check” carried out on the project – named HumAIne – at the EU’s request.

The exercise was one of box-ticking.

It came to the conclusion that HumAIne had an “exclusive focus on civil applications.” The only significant recommendation was that “an independent ethics adviser must be appointed with the relevant accumulated expertise” so that the project could be monitored.

The recommendation did not address IBM’s connections to Israel’s military. It merely referred to “ethical concerns” surrounding the project, particularly “the involvement of humans in the evaluation of AI systems.”

While HumAIne was signed off by the Brussels bureaucracy before the genocidal war on Gaza was declared in October, the EU has okayed a huge number of new research grants to Israel since then.

IBM Israel is among the recipients of those new grants. It is taking part in a project on data-sharing innovations, which the EU authorized in mid-November.

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Black athletic director of Baltimore high school arrested for creating AI deepfake of white principal to stage race hoax

A Maryland school athletic director was arrested at BWI-Marshall Airport after it was discovered that he had allegedly spread an AI-generated impersonation of the Pikesville High School principal that framed the principal as being racist. Dhazon Darien, 31, is looking at many charges due to the deepfake, including stalking, theft, disruption of school operations, and retaliation against a witness.

The police investigation began in January when a voice recording alleged to be school principal Eric Eiswert began making the rounds. Eiswert was temporarily removed from his position as head of the school and the school received many phone calls and social media comments and messages over the recording after it was spread on social media, according to The Baltimore Sun.

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Report Sounds Alarm Over Growing Role of Big Tech in US Military-Industrial Complex

The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California – a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday.

The report – entitled How Big Tech and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex – was authored by Roberto J. González, a professor of cultural anthropology at San José State University, for the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs.

The new paper comes amid the contentious rise of AI-powered lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots; increasing reliance upon AI on battlefields from Gaza to Ukraine; and growing backlash from tech workers opposed to their companies’ products and services being used to commit or enable war crimes.

“Although much of the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms,” González wrote.

“As Defense Department officials have sought to adopt AI-enabled systems and secure cloud computing services, they have awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle,” he added. “At the same time, the Pentagon has increased funding for smaller defense tech startups seeking to ‘disrupt’ existing markets and ‘move fast and break things.’”

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AI Chatbots Refuse To Produce ‘Controversial’ Output – Why That’s A Free Speech Problem

Google recently made headlines globally because its chatbot Gemini generated images of people of color instead of white people in historical settings that featured white people. Adobe Firefly’s image creation tool saw similar issues. This led some commentators to complain that AI had gone “woke.” Others suggested these issues resulted from faulty efforts to fight AI bias and better serve a global audience.

The discussions over AI’s political leanings and efforts to fight bias are important. Still, the conversation on AI ignores another crucial issue: What is the AI industry’s approach to free speech, and does it embrace international free speech standards?

We are policy researchers who study free speech, as well as executive director and a research fellow at The Future of Free Speech, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based at Vanderbilt University. In a recent report, we found that generative AI has important shortcomings regarding freedom of expression and access to information.

Generative AI is a type of AI that creates content, like text or images, based on the data it has been trained with. In particular, we found that the use policies of major chatbots do not meet United Nations standards. In practice, this means that AI chatbots often censor output when dealing with issues the companies deem controversial. Without a solid culture of free speech, the companies producing generative AI tools are likely to continue to face backlash in these increasingly polarized times.

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AI Is Now Dogfighting With Fighter Pilots In The Air

Last year, the uniquely modified F-16 test jet known as the X-62A, flying in a fully autonomous mode, took part in a first-of-its-kind dogfight against a crewed F-16, the U.S. military has announced. This breakthrough test flight, during which a pilot was in the X-62A’s cockpit as a failsafe, was the culmination of a series of milestones that led 2023 to be the year that “made machine learning a reality in the air,” according to one official. These developments are a potentially game-changing means to an end that will feed directly into future advanced uncrewed aircraft programs like the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft effort.

Details about the autonomous air-to-air test flight were included in a new video about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program and its achievements in 2023. The U.S. Air Force, through the Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), is a key participant in the ACE effort. A wide array of industry and academic partners are also involved in ACE. This includes Shield AI, which acquired Heron Systems in 2021. Heron developed the artificial intelligence (AI) ‘pilot’ that won DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials the preceding year, which were conducted in an entirely digital environment, and subsequently fed directly into ACE.

“2023 was the year ACE made machine learning a reality in the air,” Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the ACE program manager, says in the newly released video, seen in full below.

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MICROSOFT PITCHED OPENAI’S DALL-E AS BATTLEFIELD TOOL FOR U.S. MILITARY

MICROSOFT LAST YEAR proposed using OpenAI’s mega-popular image generation tool, DALL-E, to help the Department of Defense build software to execute military operations, according to internal presentation materials reviewed by The Intercept. The revelation comes just months after OpenAI silently ended its prohibition against military work.

The Microsoft presentation deck, titled “Generative AI with DoD Data,” provides a general breakdown of how the Pentagon can make use of OpenAI’s machine learning tools, including the immensely popular ChatGPT text generator and DALL-E image creator, for tasks ranging from document analysis to machine maintenance. (Microsoft invested $10 billion in the ascendant machine learning startup last year, and the two businesses have become tightly intertwined. In February, The Intercept and other digital news outlets sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.)

The Microsoft document is drawn from a large cache of materials presented at an October 2023 Department of Defense “AI literacy” training seminar hosted by the U.S. Space Force in Los Angeles. The event included a variety of presentation from machine learning firms, including Microsoft and OpenAI, about what they have to offer the Pentagon.

The publicly accessible files were found on the website of Alethia Labs, a nonprofit consultancy that helps the federal government with technology acquisition, and discovered by journalist Jack Poulson. On Wednesday, Poulson published a broader investigation into the presentation materials. Alethia Labs has worked closely with the Pentagon to help it quickly integrate artificial intelligence tools into its arsenal, and since last year has contracted with the Pentagon’s main AI office. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

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Mind Reading Technology May be Used For ‘National Security’

An ever-growing list of brain activity monitoring technologies, agencies and programs have given rise to the notion of using what comes out of such ventures – mind reading abilities – for national security threat prevention via pre-crime surveillance.

SFGate reported Tuesday that ‘we may need to rethink freedom of thought’ due to mind reading nanotech, while The Information reported Monday that AI is now being used to read the mind, leading to ‘consequences from the data gold rush’.

During a 2006 congressional discussion regarding the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act which was aimed at greatly expanding U.S. government surveillance powers, congressman Pete Hoekstra, Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee spoke to the concept of using emerging technologies in the realm of ‘intention understanding’ to scan the public for potential terroristic thoughts.

“Our country needs to rapidly and effectively bring every intelligence tool to bear to find our enemies, detect and understand their intentions, and thwart their hostile and terrorist acts against our country and our people,” Hoekstra said.

The Congressman’s goal of utilizing ‘every’ intelligence tool to ‘detect and understand’ target’s intentions implies knowing what is being thought within the brains of whomever the government deems ‘interesting‘.

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Japan Warns AI Could Cause Total Collapse of the Social Order

Two top Japanese companies have warned that artificial intelligence could cause a total collapse of the social order if it is not rapidly reigned in.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings, the country’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper, jointly published the AI manifesto.

It warned that if legislation is not passed quickly in major countries across the world, artificial intelligence threatens to decimate democracy and provoke widespread societal unrest.

Pointing to AI programs being developed by US tech giants, the manifesto warns, “In the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars.”

The report stated that such technology is designed to seize users’ attention with little regard for morality or accuracy.

Guided by Keio University researchers, the companies called on the Japanese government to pass new laws to protect elections and national security from AI.

As we previously highlighted, programs such as Google’s Gemini AI system caused fury after they openly discriminated against white people and in some cases erased them from history altogether.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT produced equally ludicrous content, in one case saying it would refuse to quietly utter a racial slur that no human could hear in order to save 1 billion white people from a “painful death.”

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Israel Lets AI Decide Who Dies in Gaza

The Israeli military has employed yet another AI-based system to select bombing targets in the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine has revealed. The new system has generated sweeping kill lists condemning tens of thousands of Palestinians, part of the IDF’s growing dependence on AI to plan lethal strikes.

Citing six Israeli intelligence officers, the Tel Aviv-based magazine said the previously undisclosed AI system, dubbed ‘Lavender,’ has played a “central role in the unprecedented bombing” of Gaza since last October, with the military effectively treating its output “as if it were a human decision.”

“Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets,” the outlet reported, adding that “during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants – and their homes – for possible air strikes.”

However, while thousands have been killed in the resulting air raids, the majority were “women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting,” the officers told the magazine, noting that Israeli field commanders often rely on the AI system without consulting more substantial intelligence.

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Is IRS using AI to infringe upon our financial privacy?

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.

The inquiry comes after the same panel has been exploring why the FBI was obtaining Americans’ bank records, including those of Jan. 6 suspects, without using search warrants or subpoenas.

Hageman told Just the News that lawmakers are increasingly concerned that federal law-enforcement agencies are no longer abiding by constitutional protections, including prohibitions against search and seizure without a warrant. 

The congressional inquiry was prompted by a September 2023 announcement that the IRS is using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”

The Treasury Department has since acknowledged it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions’ since late 2022.”

Jordan’s and Hageman’s letter said lawmakers have evidence and reason to believe that the IRS and Department of Justice (DOJ) are actively monitoring millions of Americans’ private transactions, bank accounts, and related financial information—without any legal process—using the AI-powered system.

“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private financial records raises serious doubts about the IRS’s—and the federal government’s—respect for Americans’ fundamental civil liberties,” the letter said.

You can read the letter here: 2024-03-20 JDJ HH to IRS re AI surveillance.pdf

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