If someone says “hey, you used a coin flip to decide if a school should be annihilated”, it’s pretty easy to say “We don’t use coin flips to make targeting decisions, and would never intentionally target a school”. Unless, of course, you do and did.

This is a post about AI.

@mcnado

💯 Check out @jonny's brilliant thread on how AI's primary function is to shield culpabilty:

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116196031706349510

@mastodonmigration @mcnado @jonny

If you accept that AI is a tool, how can it possibly relieve the user of the tool of culpability?
If you hit someone with a hammer, it isn't the hammer's fault!

#AI

@rgulick

At least someone has not lost all their ability to reason. Good to read a sane comment for a change.

@rgulick
@mastodonmigration @mcnado
That's what the companies are fighting tooth and nail in the courts to try and establish. Nobody is saying it makes sense, but power doesn't care about sense
@rgulick
@mastodonmigration @mcnado
Importantly it is not a hammer - the claim on the other side is actually an appeal to that kind of logic - "the AI is merely a tool" on both sides, where nobody can be held responsible. Thats why its useful to disperse culpability.

@jonny @rgulick @mcnado

Interesting. Perhaps the better analogy is that it is a hammer made of some toxic metal that poisons the user and everyone in the vicinity, and chips off poisonous pieces which scatter around any project where the toxic hammer has been used.

Accordingly, the answer is to stop producing toxic hammers, remove them from circulation, prohibit their use, and clean up wherever toxic hammers have been used.

@mcnado It's also a post about shitty intelligence. NPR has a big article about how this site had not been used by the Revolutionary Guard for years and was being redeveloped as housing. So yeah, how about you look at some satellite pictures before you bomb.
@Plantwizard @mcnado You can have gathered all the intelligence in the world, if you shove it all into a deep learning transformer to make your target decisions, then you aren't using it properly, the intelligence or the "AI."
@StarkRG @mcnado I doubt anyone following McNado would give you any argument on this. My experience with Google Gemini does not make me confident that using AI is the way to go for targeting decisions. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
@Plantwizard @mcnado it's mostly diamonds in garbage out too.

@BlueDot

co-conspirators, the presence or absence of planning, tools and means of execution matter at murder trials.

not that there would ever be a trial over this.

while we know the US military is a culpable entity in many ways, the details are still important.

@rustoleumlove

Yes, let's have all the details out in court. I'm just saying that whether some LLM was involved or not isn't going to make the difference between guilty and not guilty. The details may give us more defendants, and I'm all for that.

There must be trials over this, once we dislodge the fascist regime. If we can't get in the U.S. justice system, we need to get it at the #InternationalCriminalCourt.

@mcnado

Everybody knows there are two r’s in strawberry. That location is a military target