The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine may be the first true AI war. Both sides rely on small drones to conduct reconnaissance, identify targets and even drop deadly bombs over enemy lines. This new form of warfare allows commanders to survey space from a safe distance. and emphasized the importance of lightweight air weapons that can carry out precision strikes. Instead it was a much more expensive fighter jet. One $15,000 drone can destroy an F-16 costing tens of millions.
Reuters news agency Look. How Ukraine collects massive amounts of video footage from drones to improve the efficiency of its drone battalions
The story includes an interview with Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian non-profit system. that collects and analyzes video from more than 15,000 drones on the front lines, Dmitriev said. Reuters news agency The system has collected more than 2 million hours of battlefield video since 2022. “This is food for AI. If you want to teach AI, you give it 2 million hours (of video), it becomes supernatural,” he said.
The OCHI system was originally created to give soldiers access to drone footage from nearby crews all on a single screen. But the group that runs the system realized that the videos could be used to train AI so that the AI system could more effectively identify what it was seeing. A large number of images are required to be examined. Ukraine may not have many battlefield images before 2022. Currently, more than 6 terabytes of data is added to the system on average per day.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defense said another system called Avenger which includes images from drones in a central location 12,000 Russian devices detected per week using AI identification
It's not just local Ukrainian companies that are creating new AI technology for the battlefield. There's big money in the defense industry, and a number of Silicon Valley players, including Anduril and Palantir and Eric Schmidt's startup White Stork, have begun offering drones and AI technology to support Ukraine's fight.
Of course, the biggest concern of skeptics is that these technologies automate a lot of combat and make it relatively abstract. The military may be more likely to allow drones to attack indiscriminately. When they are at a safe distance and are not afraid of returning fire. Schmidt emphasizes that the drones his company offers to Ukraine are “human in the loop,” meaning that a person always makes the final decision.
In the Latest interviewAnduril's Palmer Luckey was asked about the use of AI in weapons systems, “There is a shadow campaign at the United Nations by many of our enemies. to fool Western countries that consider themselves moral in not using AI for weapons or defense,” he said. “What is the moral victory in being forced to use a large bomb that guarantees more damage? Because we are not allowed to use a system that can penetrate Russian or Chinese jamming systems and deliver precision attacks.”
Jamming systems can hijack GPS and telecommunications used to control precision weapons. But AI-powered drones Can work without a driver. and specify the target without requiring the operator to issue a command.
Recent reports have suggested that the United States has fall behind the enemy Including Russia and China, which have the ability to remotely disable enemy weapons using jamming technology. Russia has repeatedly disabled precision-guided missiles at the United States. Provide Ukraine with more advanced jamming technology than the United States has. The United States can respond by investing more in avoiding GPS jamming so that it no longer has to use indiscriminate autonomous drones. Or they might try to block Russia back.
Luckey points to critics who say robots shouldn't decide who lives and who dies. “And my point is Where is the moral high ground in a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of kids? and Russian tanks?” he asked. It seems unlikely that a school bus would drive across a battlefield unless it was a trap in some way.
The war progressed slowly. Both sides have made little progress in recent months. Drones help Ukraine But it is not a clear-cut panacea that is accessible to both sides.