With so many talks about AI’s potential to someday wipe out mankind with some spooky bioweapon, it seems many have overlooked the catastrophic risk that AI is actually posing in the here and now.
Bombshell new reporting by CNN revealed a horrifying episode stemming from the US Special Operations Command Pacific which almost kicked off World War III. According to the reporting, US military officials aborted a planned raid on a Chinese ship sailing in West Asia after the original intelligence report undergirding the operation turned out to be hallucinated by generative AI.
The tragicomedy unfolded like this: a special operations command analyst used an AI chatbot to put together a report on the cargo held in this particular Chinese ship. The chatbot — which has not been identified — hallucinated the kind of cargo being transported, flagging it as nuclear weapons.
After receiving those fake details, the analyst then used AI again to package them up into a standard military intelligence report, the kind trusted by top military brass to make crucial decisions.
