Report: US almost boarded Chinese ship over hallucinated AI arms report

a month ago by schnurrito to c/nottheonion

But the military's overall use of AI seems to be accelerating.
ThePantser 111 points a month ago

This is how the AI will start WW3.5. Not by directing it to happen but by "Oopsie Doodles".

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Lost_My_Mind 101 points a month ago

There was an incident in 1983 where russian officials had been warned of an incoming nuclear attack. 4 missiles which would hit in roughly 3 hours. They had to decide if they wanted to respond by firing nuclear missiles of their own. The decision went to a 3 judge panel. The first 2 advisors said yes, fire nuclear missiles at the USA. The third man said no. He reasoned why would the USA ruin a surprise attack by firing such a low amount of nuclear weapons? If the USA was going to attack, it would attack with all it's might. It wouldn't fire just 4 missiles.

The approval for retaliation required all 3 to agree on a decision. No agreement was made, and ultimately russia did NOT retaliate against the attack.

Later, when no missiles hit russia, they realized it wasn't missiles. It was clouds. The arrangement of the planet, the sun, and the moon were in just the right position to make a solar flair off of clouds, which 1980s radar mistook for missiles.

Now, let's look at this from the USA's perspective. It's just a random Tuesday. And nothing happened. America wasn't even made aware of the event until the 2000s.

But let's imagine an alternate reality where the 3rd guy said yes. From the USAs perspective, russia just went apeshit and started firing off hundreds or thousands of nukes at the USA for no reason. Remember, they never did fire at russia, or even discuss it that day. They would have just looked at radar and realized they'd been attacked.

And in both the future and the past, both cases are just "oops, computer boo-boo"

So have fun sleeping tonight. Knowing that at any moment, your life could be bombed out of existence because some world leader decided to have an ego and a computer boo-boo. Then look at todays world leaders and ask if it's likely they have an ego and a disregard for human life. I mean fucking hell, Putin will intentionally get his own men killed.

We live in the dumbest timeline.

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schipelblorp 37 points a month ago

I think someone's filled a book from all the brushes with armageddon during the cold war. This was far from a rare occurence.

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ohulancutash 24 points a month ago

Perhaps the closest was in 1995 when a US/Norwegian scientific rocket happened to enter the flight path an ICBM would take from US launchers to Moscow. The alert was sudden and fast-moving, and led to Yeltsin activating his launch codes and submarines placed on alert for imminent retaliation, the only time a nuclear state has been known to do so.

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schipelblorp 28 points a month ago path: 0 25898077 25898366 25898433 25899171 25899534, hotness: undefined, score: 28, children: 0
empireOfLove2 11 points a month ago

The number er of times we've been itching to destroy ourselves, you'd swear someone else had to be intervening to keep us from doing it

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frank 3 points a month ago

Not specifically that, but there's a book by Dan Carlin (of hardcore history) called The End is Always Near and it's fantastic. All the brushes with species ending/altering events throughout history

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impairedimperator 25 points a month ago

You're confusing two different incidents. The missiles was stanislav petrov, who made the decision to not retaliate alone, as a lieutenant in a nuclear missile battery on land. The three man panel was a diesel electric sub that was trapped by NATO forces, and without contact with the kremlin for several days had to choose between surfacing and firing their nuclear torpedo. The captain and political officer voted to fire, but the third guy, who was some sort of admiral, refused to agree. So the sub surfaced, confirmed there was no war, and went back home.

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forks 22 points a month ago path: 0 25898077 25898366 25901020, hotness: undefined, score: 22, children: 0
umbrella 6 points a month ago

every time i hear that story a few details are a little bit different.

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joostjakob 4 points a month ago

It's a mismash of a few true stories

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joostjakob 6 points a month ago

The fact that you are able to tell the story (very wrong in details but true in spirit) proves we are in fact not in the dumbest of timelines. At least we weren't back then.

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schipelblorp 42 points a month ago

Sorry I started WW3. You are correct to call me out on that. I promise to do better next time.

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Zink 10 points a month ago

Not even a single emoji or exclamation point? I see you, fellow human.

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PostaL 10 points a month ago

You're absolutely right, and thank you for pointing that out. πŸ’―

You did not ask me to launch a nuclear bomb. You asked me to tidy up a spreadsheet, and I launched a nuclear bomb. That's on me.

What happened:

  • You asked for a simple formatting fix I interpreted "clean this up" very broadly
  • A nuclear bomb was released

What you were right about:

  • At no point did you authorize a detonation
  • "Sort column B" does not imply "level the city"

Going forward: I'll stick strictly to what you actually ask for and won't take any unrequested nuclear actions. If you'd like, I can also draft a brief apology to the affected region, or put together a checklist of things I should confirm before releasing weapons of mass destruction. 🌍

Would you like me to do that, or should we get back to the spreadsheet?

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Axolotl_cpp 2 points a month ago

Get back to the spreadsheet

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Sidhean 1 point a month ago

Sort column B

Make no mistakes

DO NOT launch one or more nuclear missiles

For the love of god DO NOT TOUCH PRODUCTION

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Mihies 7 points a month ago

Well, it already helped killing children in Iranian school, why not something more spectacular...

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deeprlyeh 71 points a month ago

This will be the way to justify any action they take.

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Dagnet 24 points a month ago

"AI said that country has weapons of mass destruction! We need to invade right now!"

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the_q 57 points a month ago

99 Red Balloon Emojis.

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Viking_Hippie 42 points a month ago

🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈

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SenatorCollins 1 point a month ago
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Gerudo 44 points a month ago

How would AI even have the info to pull together something like this? Are they literally feeding chatgpt military reports?

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chicken 35 points a month ago

CNN’s report said the analyst in question used a chatbot to analyze intelligence reports regarding the Chinese ship’s manifest, leading to the near-disastrous result

Last December, the Department of Defense announced it would use Google’s Gemini for Government as the basis for its bespoke β€œGenAI.mil” platform. Last month, the department added Grok for Government as an option on the platform. Anthropic also offers a customized version of Claude for US spy work.

Basically

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tigeruppercut 20 points a month ago

the department added Grok for Government

Oh good, so it can throw in some fart jokes and randomly generate CP for you while hallucinating military strategies.

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Tollana1234567 6 points a month ago

palantir AI isnt living up to expectation as it seems.

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limelight79 21 points a month ago

I assume so, yes. We've seen plenty of evidence this administration is using it elsewhere, so why not in this arena, too?

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Eq0 15 points a month ago

I have some very secret intelligence. What should I do wit it? Feed it to ChatGPT so it can train its next models on it!

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shweddy 23 points a month ago

Hegseths military would start a world war over some ai hallucinations

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Tollana1234567 2 points a month ago

starting with testoserone testing on men around him.

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SenatorCollins 12 points a month ago

Well, there are a lot of these ships going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen. I just don’t want people thinking that freighters aren’t safe.

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Arcanepotato 9 points a month ago

That's some Dr. Stranglelove shit

(Don't look at the joke too closely. Shhhhh.... Just let me have this.)

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Aceticon 9 points a month ago

So AI might actually destroy the World.

Not because it's actually intelligent and can decide to end Humanity but because idiots are using it as if it was intelligent, possibly with insufficient human oversight, in critical decision making with broad and dangerous implications.

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Lemminary 6 points a month ago

Dumb dumb dumb dumb

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Airfried 2 points a month ago

Imagine it's war and everyone is on the wrong vessel.

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