In the Flemish newspaper De Standaard (6/12/2023), Marijn Hoijtink and Robin Vanderborght reflect on Israel’s use of autonomous targeting software and heavy bombing in Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks. They argue that Israel’s use of technologies like Gospel and Lavender in Gaza shows that AI technology and widespread automation lead to more attacks and, consequently, more civilian casualties – contrary to claims that the use of ‘smart’ technologies in war works to minimize harm to civilians. The violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israel show, Hoijtink and Vanderborght argue, that technological superiority in no way translates to moral superiority.
RAW’s Jessica Dorsey co-authored a piece in for OpinioJuris (4/4/2024) and was interviewed by UK Times Radio. In her appearances, Dorsey critically reflects on how AI-driven systems such as Lavender enable war and destruction to occur at an increasing speed and scale. Dorsey highlights the risks that these unregulated systems pose concerning civilian harm and international humanitarian law, and underscores the urgent need for the regulation of AI-enabled decision-support systems.
In an interview with the Belgian radio channel Radio 1 (4/4/2024) Marijn Hoijtink voices concerns about Lavenders accuracy and diminished levels of human oversight in Israel’s application of Lavender. She notes that Lavender’s stated failure rate of 10% (claims on the technology have not been independently verified) is deeply problematic in the context of a technology that determines matters of life and death. A technology with such a failure rate may well be incompatible with Israel’s legal obligation to carefully verify targets to protect civilians and non-military infrastructure, especially when meaningful human verification of Lavender’s suggested targets is lacking.
In another radio interview, this time with the Dutch radio broadcaster BNR (25/6/2024), Marijn Hoijtink discussed the role of large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Palantir in contemporary warfare. In the interview, she underlines that AI is changing the human-machine-human interaction in targeting cycles by increasing the speed of war fighting.
Closing out 2024, Marijn Hoijtink appeared on BNR for a second time (27/11/2024), this time explaining the varying levels of autonomy in autonomous weapon systems, ranging from “human in the loop” to fully autonomous operations. She furthermore stresses that AI is also used to support military decision-making processes, including targeting decisions, and highlights the importance of understanding how these systems work – something that is complicated by the secrecy surrounding such decision support systems.
