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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

History shows the US has a lot of hallucinated intelligence leading to war. WMD in Iraq comes to mind. I personally don't believe US intelligence on practically anything. It is all tainted. The pressure to 'find targets' to justify a political objective is overwhelming and putting it behind a black box that refuses to show its homework to those in ops using it, and ultimately the US people to judge decisions, is a cancer that leads to epic mistakes. Everything hidden in a dark 'need to know don't question it' box is bound to end up corrupt since there are no checks on that system. We have been building systems and processes for a long time that tell us what we want to hear, not what is real and not what we need to know. AI hasn't changed this, it has just made it even harder to realize since the product seems more polished.

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Sometimes intelligence "finds" evidence that suits political goals. e.g. You want to invade a country but are having a hard time convincing allies, getting UN approval, etc.. So, you let it be known to your spooks that you're not going to look too closely at their sources if they could just, pretty please, find something/anything juicy right bloody quick. The WMD evidence for the second U.S. invasion of Iraq was likely a case of this.

Then there's old-fashioned F'ups that don't fit your political agenda and are often quite damaging and embarrassing, not to mention lethal for people who don't deserve it. e.g. The U.S. used AI tools meant for rapidly picking targets in the middle of a war to plan their initial strikes on Iran. They had time to double check everything and do their due diligence before striking, but they didn't. So, a school next to a military base was targeted and a lot of kids died. This was a genuine F'up resulting from relying on a tool meant to give rapid but merely okay target selection under time pressure when there was no time pressure. The real mistake was made by humans.

The current case of the mistaken nuclear weapon parts shipment seems like an old-fashioned F'up, updated for the times. The people who didn't simply trust the tools and actually double checked should be commended. Others in their situation wouldn't have. I fully expect AI will be scapegoated for a lot of similar F'ups in the future even though it's still the responsibility of human beings to use ethics, caution, and restraint. AI doesn't get fired. Doesn't sue. It's actually pretty awesome for taking the blame.

Was WMD "hallucinated" or a lie?

both. they wanted to deceive people (lie). so they made up a reason (hallucinate).

>so they made up a reason (hallucinate).

deterministically formulating a lie for public consumption is a lie, not a hallucination. Let's stop changing the meanings of words please.

Well said

Back then it was called “the truth” only later did it become something else. Perhaps an untruth.

Agreed, but They were accurate on the Russia full scale invasion, months before it happened

Individual incidents aren't representative of accuracy or well-tuned truth seeking processes, that can only be assessed over time.

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