alt Hacker News> It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.
The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.
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Important context is that the notes about the changing use of the location weren’t even in a connected system. Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this, or if they would have known to check this unconnected system.
> Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting
"In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error."
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Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.
Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs.
"A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must must never make a management decision" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.
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Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong...
But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...