After the “Al-Aqsa Flood” and the start of the brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip this October, one of the controversial photos spread on social media, showing (1) an Israeli soldier looking like one of the superheroes in Hollywood movies, carrying in his hands two infants whom he allegedly saved. From Hamas after they were kidnapped by the movement’s gunmen and placed in a safe in the Gaza Strip. Despite the wide spread of the image, it was later found that it was generated by artificial intelligence tools.
This type of misleading information is what prompted the British scientist Demis Hassabis, a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence, to declare (2): “We must deal with the risks of artificial intelligence with the same amount of seriousness with which we deal with the climate crisis,” adding that this new technology The superhuman has another dark side that is different from what we know about it. It can become a tool for killing and contribute to the creation of biological weapons. Above all, its capabilities can be used to manipulate minds and direct public opinion through techniques for generating written and visual content, which are used as an effective means in “information wars.”
In fact, the information age (3) has contributed to making the world we live in a more ambiguous place, and with the presence of such technologies we can no longer trust the news and stories presented to us, especially after the media was filled with unconfirmed speculation and false and fabricated news, which is what we see. Today it is evident in the war waged by the Israeli occupation on the Gaza Strip.
“40 Headless Children” In May 2021, (4) the Israeli occupation army described the “Keeper of the Walls” battle launched by the occupation forces on the Gaza Strip as the first “artificial intelligence war” in the world, as this high-tech technology contributed, according to Israeli officials ( 5) In doubling the strength of the Israeli army during the fighting that lasted 11 days, thanks to automatic weapons, spyware, and Palestinian tracking and surveillance tools. These same allegations have been repeated in the past few days to describe the attacks currently launched by the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip under the name of Operation “Iron Swords,” but this time the reason is different. The same approach that was used to track and engage targets on the ground has also been used in cyberspace to target audiences and direct public opinion.
The best example of this is what happened last October 7, coinciding with the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, when the international community was surprised by the allegations (6) made by the Israeli occupation army and the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing members of the Palestinian resistance movement (Hamas) of cutting off heads. 40 infants.
The Hamas resistance movement denied the Israeli story, but that “small misleading piece of information” spread like wildfire and was reported by international news agencies as a confirmed fact, especially after US President Joe Biden confirmed it, claiming that he had seen pictures of beheaded infants himself, a statement that the White House retracted. Then he denied seeing any pictures. According to a report (7) issued by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, the Israeli occupation army did not provide any evidence to support the validity of its claims, despite the passage of more than 20 days since the start of the war.
The Israeli allegations did not stop there, and this time a photo of a charred infant was used inside an Israeli hospital. It was rumored to be a child among the victims of October 7, which incited public opinion against the Palestinian resistance, but by examining photo (8) it was revealed that it was It is also produced by artificial intelligence programs.
(Artificial intelligence exposes Netanyahu’s lie by publishing a photo he claims is of an Israeli child)
Information warfare in Israel takes many forms (9). It spreads false and misleading information at times, and works to distort the public image of political opponents at other times. All of this is part of the propaganda war process that aims to promote a specific point of view and shape public opinion. Israel has systematically exploited the digital transformation witnessed by various media outlets, and the way in which social media has become a tool for exchanging news, and has used this in its information war on Gaza over the past decade to serve its military goals, the effects of which we can see in the ongoing war within the Strip. now.
An army of robots
Over the past two centuries, the image has been the most reliable medium for transmitting news of wars. We learned about the horror of battles from the pictures taken by the first war photographers in the mid-nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Then we discovered death again, reflected on photographic paper, and through it we contemplated the inhumanity of humanity. Man, as Perry Sanders says in his book “The Disappearance of the Human Being” (10), even we still trust and believe the image.
The era of deep fakes of photographs and audio recordings has come to kill this trust and credibility, as it belies what our eyes see and our ears hear, and this is the crisis we are experiencing today in our digital world linked to the Internet. James Bridle criticized the information age we live in in his book “A New Dark Age,” saying that the problem does not lie in the lack of information, but rather in its excessive increase. (11) Internet culture has allowed us to easily share photos and videos on social networking sites without verifying their authenticity, especially If these images touch the emotions of the masses and provide moving and coherent stories, then misinformation spreads more.
The artificial intelligence revolution has exacerbated this problem, resulting in an increase in the overall volume of misinformation. Today we are witnessing tools that “fabricate” images in a few minutes, and chat “bots” that can generate news from nothing, which changes the rules of the war game forever (12). To confront this torrent of fake news, social media platforms, led by the technology giant Meta, which owns the Facebook, Instagram, and Threads platforms, have taken the necessary measures to delete violating and harmful content (13), but this authority is supposed to be used to fight information. Misleading, it has been used as a tool to censor and silence voices since Israel launched its war on Gaza.
Social media sites launched a parallel war in which they cracked down on content supportive of the Palestinian cause, classifying it as misinformation or incitement to violence. On the other hand, we find posts that support Israel’s brutal bombing receiving encouragement from social media algorithms, which enables them to appear more effectively. This is what Alice Gecker referred to when he talked about “armies of robots” of artificial intelligence that work to filter content and determine whether it is pro-Israel or against it. If it is with Israel, an army of robots will generate a torrent of positive reactions from likes and shares to it. If the content is against them, these robots will report it so that this unwanted content does not receive any interaction (14).
Baptist bombing and information wars
Things did not stop there. When the bombing that targeted the “Al-Ahly Al-Baptist” Hospital in Gaza occurred on October 17, the official spokesman for the Israeli occupation army came out, claiming that the missile that caused this human tragedy resulted from a failed launch of one of the “Islamic Jihad Movement” missiles. His story was based on two claims. The first was video clips and photos taken by satellite, and the second was an audio recording said to be of a phone call between a former member of the Hamas movement and a resident of the Gaza Strip, and many sources doubted the authenticity of both matters.
For its part, (16) The New York Times conducted an extensive analysis of the video clips mentioned in the Israeli story, noting that two explosions occurred near the Baptist Hospital within two minutes of the bombing, and it doubted that the missile that appeared in the video and which Israeli officials built on it was Their story is that he caused the hospital explosion.
At the same time, media coverage (17) confirmed that the missile that struck the Baptist Hospital fell vertically, which contradicts the Israeli story about its launch from a cemetery near the hospital. As for the phone call,… The audio recording was met (18) What was issued by Israel is also doubted by experts, as She paid (19) The British Channel 4 conducted an investigation that doubted that the dialect used in the recording was the local dialect of the residents of the Gaza Strip, which opens the door to a strong possibility that the recording was fabricated, which is completely consistent with the forgery practices that the Israeli occupation state has fallen into repeatedly since the beginning of the war. .
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Sources:
- “This is probably the first AI war”
- AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief
- A new dark age
- Israel’s operation against Hamas was the world’s first AI war
- Automated Apartheid: How Israel’s occupation is powered by big tech, AI, and spyware
- Israel falsely accused of sharing fake images of Hamas atrocities using AI
- Fact Sheet: Israel’s History of Spreading Disinformation
- Artificial intelligence exposes Netanyahu’s lies by publishing a photo he claims is of an Israeli child
- Israel’s information war
- The disappearance of human beings – unwary souls
- Real images or fake news? How to avoid sharing misinformation on social media
- IntelBrief: AI-Powered Disinformation in the Israel-Hamas War and Beyond
- Meta ‘taking steps’ to censor support for Palestinian resistance
- Pro-Palestinian creators use secret spellings, code words to evade social media algorithms
- Israeli army spokesman: Hamas exaggerated death tolls in the hospital explosion
- A Close Look at Some Key Evidence in the Gaza Hospital Blast
- British channel: Israel falsified evidence regarding targeting Baptist Hospital in Gaza
- Gaza Baptist Hospital massacre: Why Israeli Hamas ‘audio evidence’ is probably disinformation
- Who was behind the Gaza hospital blast – visual investigation
