‘AI-assisted genocide’: Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists
Al Jazeera
Two Israeli media outlets report Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted system called Lavender to identify Gaza targets.
The Israeli military’s reported use of an untested and undisclosed artificial intelligence-powered database to identify targets for its bombing campaign in Gaza has alarmed human rights and technology experts who said it could amount to “war crimes”.
The Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language media outlet Local Call reported recently that the Israeli army was isolating and identifying thousands of Palestinians as potential bombing targets using an AI-assisted targeting system called Lavender.
“That database is responsible for drawing up kill lists of as many as 37,000 targets,” Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, said on Thursday.
The unnamed Israeli intelligence officials who spoke to the media outlets said Lavender had an error rate of about 10 percent. “But that didn’t stop the Israelis from using it to fast-track the identification of often low-level Hamas operatives in Gaza and bombing them,” Challands said.
It is becoming clear the Israeli army is “deploying untested AI systems … to help make decisions about the life and death of civilians”, Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor in Middle East Studies and digital humanities at Hamid Bin Khalifa University, told Al Jazeera.