Pentagon used Elon Musk’s Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran, official says
9h 58m ago by lemmy.world/u/MicroWave in news from www.independent.co.uk
Donald Trump’s administration turned to Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to launch thousands of missiles in Iran, according to a top defense official.
In a sworn statement defending the trillionaire from a lawsuit alleging xAI data centers are illegally polluting Black communities, the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence chief said the chatbot’s continued operation is “a matter of paramount national security” — and was used to fire more than “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”
Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, is among four AI models “currently capable of supporting national security applications,” according to Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer.
That’s why the US blew up that girls’ school, Grok just couldn’t stay away from underage children.
Needed more "training data".
*training bra data
I should upvote this because it is rather clever but I also threw up in my mouth a bit so I don't feel right doing so.
Those girls were too young for bra even
It was trying to take their clothes off.
Nope, wrong:
“USA Missle Command Turns Their Brains Off When Selecting Targets, Leaves National Security Decisions to Elon’s Porn Chatbot”
The AI didn’t “do” anything; a human used it to be functionally negligent in their duties. That’s how this should be reported on.
lol, what was the prompt?
"yo grok, can you click this button that launch the operation so we can justify the bribe to elon"
AI cannot make management decisions. The idea that anyone should hand over responsibility for missile deployment to a machine completely undermines the integrity of any military decision. Also, Grok is a CP creation tool, an evil automaton that should be turned off.
All the misinformation that grok was trained with for political reasons will surely help with good management decisions.
"xAI is allowed to hurt black people because it is helping hurt iranians" is a wild take if you don't want your caste physically rendered by a slavering mob
What I don't get is how a chatbot fires a missile...I mean you could give it a function call, but I don't think we're at that point of insanity just yet
Maybe it could read through Intel and recommend targets, but there's no way anyone is reviewing the research thoroughly, with the diligence appropriate before taking lives
Can we stop the bullshitting and call the media out on this more? This is obviously just offloading responsibility to an entity beyond punishment
A fourth grader could see the problem here... It's not if AI is or isn't competent, it's that the people involved are incentivized to blindly trust the AI. That no one is taking responsibility for, so really it's no one's fault when schoolchildren are slaughtered
The first completely AI-driven kill chain was confirmed several years ago, so I wouldn't put anything past anyone.
Yup started with hardware like Gorgon Stare, then machine learning for targeting data, then Anduril to collect the metadata from satelites and other sources. They stitch it together, send the package to an analyst for review and they decide if/when to pull the trigger. Sounds like that last part is just a butterbar responding to a Grok prompt now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
https://arxiv.org/html/2602.13324
Surely the automated drone Torment Nexus will be a net benefit to humanity. We can hellfire so many Pakistani weddings now.
From what I have seen in the various articles and interviews covering this:
The idea is that "AI" is used to detect possible targets and "write the first draft" of the report suggesting a strike based upon available intel. It is then used to flesh out that "draft" into a full report. It is THEN used to determine which reports are valid. And THEN it is used to draft the orders to whoever is firing the missile.
And... much like with software development, there ARE some genuinely good use cases in there. "Traditional" inference models are spectacular for identifying the kinds of anomalies that could be troop movements or "insurgents". For close on 20 years now, it has been pretty trivial to hook up a few basic computer vision packages to county traffic feeds and cyberstalk your friends (or worse). Mostly because it is computer vision to essentially label clips and then pattern matching to... find patterns.
And... there are strong arguments for using LLMs to break full reports back down into weighted bullet points to accelerate the parsing and evaluation of requests for attacks. Which... mostly speaks to how maybe we should just normalize communicating in bullet points but...
The issue is, like it is always is, the humans. The folk who are going to use an inference model to identify potential targets? They probably aren't going to evaluate the results and write their own reports. They'll just generate them. And if they are the kind of person who can't be arsed to parse intel feeds OR write about them... are they the kind of person who is going to do an editing pass? And if nobody is writing the reports that are sent, why would anyone read them?
So the end result is everyone just smiles and brags about how their entire job can be done by a computer. And the only human intervention is that "somebody" should probably go in and add a weight to say not to target schools and hospitals but... someone else can do that.
You hear that Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. that means their data centers are valid military targets
Yet another reason we are losing a war that shouldn't have been started in the first place.
My thoughts exactly. "We used grok to bomb them" and the result of that was us agreeing to all their concessions and giving them $300 billion to end the conflict.
We will use AI to make bad decisions more quickly, but not only that, we will use the worst AI to make the worst decisions possible.
We would have used a Chinese AI because it's cheaper, but we weren't allowed to. So Grok it is, which is fine, because Musk is the only ally to the current administration that is as reliable as Trump.
Wasn’t Grok absurdly expensive because it rambled a shit ton when talking to itself?
So much for DOGE
I wonder how they're using LLMs for this
"Hey Grok, scan this map, what looks like enemy base to you?"
Does Grok even have vision capabilities?
It's AI, do you think something so trivial would stop it?
In all the comparative tests, that's consistently the most psychopathic one...
No wonder they lost to Iran
The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which uses AI to lay out data on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making.
Those AI products do not explicitly create targets but work within Maven to identify potential points of interest for military intelligence.
Did they all miss?