AI error or not, Iran school bombing is a permanent stain on America's soul

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/iran-girls-school-bombing-ai-20260308.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/5K9hZ

The numbers — maybe 175 dead, maybe more — are staggering, but what really matters are their names.

There was Ehsan Saleminia, just 6 years old; Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, age 7; Zeynab Bahrami, 10; Mohammad Shah-dousti, 8; Reza Barani, 7; Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10; Khadijeh Darvishi, 9; Reza Ranjbar, 6; Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, 7; Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 — and dozens more.

You can read many of their names here. Every American should take a minute to do this — to remember that an undeclared war waged in our names is about more than rising gasoline prices.

They had faces that flashed with the unblemished softness of youth and bright smiles that look no different than the impish grins you might find at the elementary school near your own leafy American neighborhood, beaming toward a future they will not live to see.

They had dreams — to become a scientist or a poet or a cleric or to find love or have kids of their own — that will never be realized, and they leave parents and grandparents and siblings who spend their every remaining tortured minute on Earth filled with the anger and the sorrow and the unanswered questions.

*snip*

[UpInArms]

1. more from your link

The debate started as soon as the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has been using Anthropic’s advanced AI program Claude to both identify bombing targets in Iran and also prioritize them. As anyone who’s used AI or encountered it during online searches knows, AI tools are trained on the information that has been previously published, so it makes sense to ask whether Claude — if in fact used here — wrongly believed the elementary school building was part of the naval base as it apparently had been at one time.

There are huge and justifiable concerns about handing life-or-death decisions to robots, especially one still experiencing growing pains. In 2024, I wrote a column about Israel’s reported use of AI programs to target its massive bombing of Gaza, which is responsible for many of the 74,000 reported deaths there. But I also argued then that the Israeli program called Lavender “is issuing death warrants for toddlers and their mothers because it reflects the inhumanity that we programmed it with.”

and an archive link (past the paywall)

https://archive.ph/5K9hZ#selection-1265.0-1281.335

[usonian]

2. The whole Anthropic-OpenAI shitstorm was a setup.

NOT US.

BLAME AI.