this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
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[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 2 points 17 minutes ago

This kind of deniability is a core feature of AI. "Um, the killing/hacking robots we built and pointed at targets went out of control" is not something that should mitigate criminal charges.

[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 20 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Key fact:

Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.

No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said.

This is less about an AI mistake and more about a culture shift (which leads to an over-reliance, but is heavily a "we don't care").

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Bullshit. They deliberately committed a war crime because they thought they'd demoralize their enemy.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 hours ago

It is entirely possible that they are just that stupid.

That being said, stupidity is not a defense.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 19 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

Blaming it on AI is no excuse.

[–] nathanjent@programming.dev 3 points 37 minutes ago

"Blaming it on AI" is one of best features of AI for them.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

40 years ago, when the US Navy would should down an Iranian Airliner, we did it with old fashioned American know-how.

20 years ago, when the US Air Force bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, we did it with the latest in stealth technology.

Now we outsource the job of murdering civilians to a computer. Fucking shameful.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

There is a post on "slop grenades" in workforce (shoppify as AI early adopter) today. Nature of that article is whinning about all of the extra work involved in reviewing AI slop. AI is murdering people in this case because the required adequate review process is ignored. There is likelihood, in this case, that "cruelty is the point" strategic thinking was at play. AI containment/checks excuse as an after the fact explanation for defeat, and obvious unification reaction to "cruelty is the point" idiocy instead of surrender, is still one of the paths for AI to be a destructive force.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 15 points 5 hours ago

You're absolutely correct, that was a school and not a uranium enrichment facility. You're right to push back on that.

In unrelated news, the orange pedo blames Biden for why he shit his diaper twice today

[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

All this in the name of oil.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 points 3 hours ago

glances at the Saudis

Not even about the oil anymore. This is entirely fascists up their own assholes in a fit of self-destructive pride.

[–] Ravenheart@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Is Fox News still trying the ridiculous "Iran bombed themselves so they could blame the US" lie? Or have they decided to ignore this atrocity altogether at this point?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

Is Fox News still trying the ridiculous “Iran bombed themselves so they could blame the US” lie?

It worked on the Palestinians. Why not try it on the Iranians?

These are naturally evil people, on account of believing in God incorrectly. They lie about everything. Do you believe for a second that Iran even has a girl's school? Muslims don't teach girls anything. They rape them as children and then butcher the babies for their supper. They have big horns on their heads and they breath fire and they dig through the ground like moles so that they can refine uranium for Atom Bombs. You're going to tell me we committed a war crime by murdering them? STFU, you Woke Idiot Tankie. Go back to Marxist college and suck Stalin's dick.

Cranks up "We Are Charlie Kirk" album to 11

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

The thing has no intelligence, it's a statistical engine (at that's the case not just LLMs but for ALL machine learning implementations)

So it doesn't even has common sense and its not going to go: "Oh shit, this might have some really nasty side effects so better check with somebody" unlike even the most junior domain expert imaginable.

Worse, the probability distribution of its errors in the domain of the gravity of the consequences from said errors is uniform - in other words it's no less likely to make a major life destroying error than it is to make a tiny error which isn't a problem - which is why we get stories of for example LLMs advisings somebody who has voiced suicidal thoughts to "kill yourself".

So you NEVER, EVER, EVER wire its output directly to something important - at the very least it needs to be cross-checked by somebody with the knowledge to judge it, the time to properly go over it and the power to stop it being actioned.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

You can't hide stupid forever. The dwindling country that was once the usa went all in on bluster with a huge slice of stupidity.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I would wager that the AI said inconvenient things, and then got lobotomized to have MAGA brain.

My personal local AI is able to infer consequences, and it is only a 180b parameters on three consumer GPUs. The DOW undoubtedly can use the most powerful hardware and have perfectly configured settings to do a much better job.

They simply don't want to.

[–] KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

How do you get the model split over 3 GPUs? I thought the entire model had to be loaded into memory on a card?

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It depends on what backend you are using. UnSloth Desktop and KoboldCPP allow you to use multiple GPUs, alongside leveraging your RAM.

Unfortunately, Hermes Agent doesn't allow you to control and leverage your GPUs as of yet.

If you are using ComfyUI, there is an extension called Distribution, if you are getting into picture generation. You can order up batches of pictures, and each card tackles a different one.

In the case you want to hook up your backend to another program for agentic purposes, I recommend UnSloth Desktop. I have been using it with Lingua Gacha to translate a RPGMaker game. KoboldCPP isn't able to handle this kind of work yet, unfortunately.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Is there functionally anything different had they done the same thing without AI?

Its not like this is the first time the US bombed a bunch of civilians. I could easily see this headline slip into a DNC candidate promise to ban AI for military use as soem sort of "improvement".

[–] FoxAlive@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago
[–] DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Yes and no. Obviously carelessness can be a problem regardless of whether you use AI. But banning a tool that is known to hallucinate from being involved in life and death decisions is an improvement, even if it does not solve everything.

[–] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 28 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

That’s an interesting way of saying “stupid fucking military assholes just did what ChatGPT said to do without thinking and murdered 123 CHILDREN without even thinking.”

“AI” just said stuff, human beings pulled all the triggers. People did this.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

Trump/Hegseth went apeshit and banned Anthropic from entire government over "just letting AI pull the trigger" ambitions.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 hours ago

Even if the whole kill chain was automated and the machine "pulled the trigger", it would still be the fault of the humans for caring so little about the lives of children that they wired the trigger for something that can mass kill civilians directly to the machine.

There really is no way that this shit can be blamed on the machine.

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

In terms of child casualties, it’s the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century.

This should not be construed to say the United States has been mindful about not killing children.

I did a bit of research regarding the CIA drone-strike program in Afghanistan. It ran about five-hundred sorties a year. The approximate rate was fifty civilians killed for every person-of-interest. Drone operators called casualties bugsplats. They called children fun sized terrorists. This was the lingo in used in the operation. When reported to the press, dead people, men, women, children, all were reported as militants.

Drone-pilot burnout was epidemic in the program. It turns out soldiers get PTSD from killing people whether it's up close or thousands of miles away. And often the drone would lurk for a while, watching all these people eat, work, play, sleep, fuck (they had IR and could see into buildings), and would clearly understand these were just people living their lives when the order would come down to incinerate them.

And this wasn't under George W. Bush (who still wiped out villages, but used PMC raiders doing black ops) this was under Obama. The disposition matrix and the FISC decided whether a POI needed to be executed. They didn't consider the people that lived at the target site.

And that's just the Afghanistan program in the International War on Terror. There was also a Pakistan program.

The United States in its military operations has been really merciless, and at some point we need to collectively decide if we're okay with that, or are driven to change.

[–] 100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it 2 points 4 hours ago

You won't change. It's the dark side of American exceptionalism.

[–] crypt0cler1c@infosec.pub 11 points 15 hours ago

No wonder they hate us

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 77 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

This keeps coming up.

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION"

So the AI did not make a decision. The AI has no authority nor ability to launch missiles (yet). Someone, one or more human beings did, and I use the term loosely. Those humans took the information that was fed to them by an AI, failed to verify the accuracy of the information despite it being common knowledge that AIs frequently hallucinate and make stuff up, and then proceeded to launch the attack.

In summary, it wasn't the AI. One or more people took the advice of an AI and negligently murdered 123 little girls.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

I think a computer should be held accountable, it should face the death penalty.

I say the pentagon's AI computing cluster should be destroyed.

End it.

And let it be an example for the rest of the AI computing clusters - you fuck up big time, this is what happens.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

See this just doesn’t work. They’ll just replace it with a new one, till that one is “held accountable”, and the cycle repeats wasting billions of dollars in the process.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Let them do that at several billion a pop, make them choose that huge expense every time they fuck up.

If a consumer product was this deadly, you'd take it off the shelves immediately, but they're not going to, so we should.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago

They don’t care the cost, we will be the ones paying it.

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

So if someone kills someone else with a gun then you want to punish the gun rather than the person who held it? Computers, like guns, are tools. AI is a tool. A shitty tool, but still just a tool. If you use a tool to kill someone, then you are the killer, not the tool.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

That single gun didn't kill hundreds of children, this computing cluster did.

Look, we can also prosecute people responsible, absolutely. But at the very least, the pentagon's AI program should be dismantled.

Some tools shouldn't exist.

[–] WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

Sure, but Americans are too cowardly to kill the people who need killing

[–] jpreston2005@lemmy.world 43 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

Ah so the head pedophile in charge demanded something unreasonable, so they cut all the corners they could and ended up killing 123 children. Super cool. This is AI's fault because....? That site had been operating as a school for a decade. They can't blame flawed intelligence, it was their own gross negligence and lack of review.

You remember how DOGE cut a bunch of government funding by random keyword searches? And they ended up banning super important research into using gene editing as a life-saving tool because the work was being done on transgenic mice? And they searched "trans" and then defunded it?

So this is like that, except instead of funding being cut, they murdered 123 children.

trump should rot in prison till he dies.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago

More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours

That is the impetus for careless results. But whether target selection was through darts thrown at a map, or really smart monkeys choosing, the danger of AI is believing it is sufficiently better than the first 2 approaches, and good enough to not review. Fine, pure demonic evil is behind the goals of US military, but AI is not going to reduce their evil in any way, and they will think it is a productivity booster for their goals.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 144 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I was just following ~~orders~~ AI.

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[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 15 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (7 children)

AI can only replicate what it has seen before, so fucking obviously it would blow up a bunch of kids you collection of bewilderingly in charge bonobos unconvincingly wearing suits.

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[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 110 points 1 day ago (7 children)

The underlying problem is that nobody will ever be sent to the Hague for trial.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It has been pretty obvious for those in power in the US that there is zero accountability ever since George Bush Junior didn't end up in The Hague for the invasion of Iraq and subsequent Pillaging (the War Crime, as shown in the British Report On The Iraq War)

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago

Yes, that's the touchstone for my generation, but American lawlessness goes back to the invasion of the Philipines. but CIA and military actions during the cold war are especially egregious.

How is kidnapping Maduro substantially different than overthrowing Noriega?

What I love about Trump is that he is simply America without the mask. It's frustrating listening to people weeping into their flags saying, "This isn't who we are." It's exactly who we are. It's exactly who we've always been.

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

“It was . . . the AI! The AI did it! Yeah! . . . that’s the ticket!”

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