Tool of Genocide or “Simply a Database”?

They were the Gazans whom “the machine” suspected of being jihadists or their relatives. Those whom the AI program codenamed Lavender found suspicious enough were blown up together with the buildings they were in – with huge human “collateral damage.”

In several interviews with international media, journalist Yuval Abraham confirmed the worst suspicions about the program.

“In the next step, the machine ordered the destruction of the building with people inside it, including children. There was minimal human supervision of AI’s actions – one of my sources said he spent just 20 seconds before authorizing the bombing,” Abraham added.

“The system your questions refer to is not a system, but simply a database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources in order to produce up-to-date layers of information on the military operatives of terrorist organizations. This is not a list of confirmed military operatives eligible to attack,” the IDF said in a statement published in response to questions from the British daily The Guardian.

How Many People Have Been Killed by AI in Gaza?

In his interview to Democracy Now, Abraham revealed the grim statistics of Lavender’s operations:

“The military knew that approximately 10 percent of the people whom the machine marked to be killed – one-tenth of them were not Hamas militants,” Abraham said in the interview.

“Some of them had a loose connection to Hamas, some had completely no connection. One source told me how the machine marked people who had the same name and nickname as another person, a Hamas operative… The military had what they called a collateral damage degree. Another source said that up to 20 innocent civilians could be killed in order to liquidate one low-ranking Hamas activist. For high-ranking officers, say, a Hamas brigade commander, the number could be in triple digits – for the first time in Israeli Defense Force’s history.”

The following question is inevitable: who is going to be held responsible for the use of an Israeli AI machine that, according to the officers interviewed by Abraham, marked 37,000 people in Gaza as targets for annihilation?

“Essentially, it is not the machine, but the human being that imagines, designs, creates and then triggers such a machine into action – that person is responsible for everything that results,” Bennett noted.

«No part of life and death decisions which impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms,» Guterres is quoted by international news agencies as saying.