The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine marks the first AI war, with both sides relying on small drones to conduct reconnaissance, identify targets, and even drop deadly bombs over enemy lines. This new type of warfare allows commanders to survey the area from a safe distance and has highlighted the importance of light air weapons that can carry out precision strikes instead of expensive fighter jets. A single drone that costs $15,000 can take on an F-16 that costs tens of millions.
Reuters looks at how Ukraine has been collecting large amounts of video footage from drones to improve the effectiveness of its drone warfare.
The story includes an interview with Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian non-profit program that centralizes and analyzes video from more than 15,000 drones on the frontlines. Dmitriev said Reuters that the program has collected more than two million hours of battlefield video as of 2022. “This is AI food: If you want to teach AI, you give it 2 million hours (of video), it will become supernatural,” he said.
The OCHI system was originally designed to give soldiers access to drone footage from all nearby personnel on a single screen, but the running team realized that the footage could be used to train AI. For an AI system to be effective in identifying what it sees, it needs to review many images; Ukraine probably didn’t have many pictures of the battlefield before 2022. Now, more than six terabytes of data are added to the system per day, on average.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said another program called Avengers, which combines images from drones, was able to identify 12,000 pieces of Russian equipment in a week using AI detection.
It’s not just local Ukrainian companies that are developing new AI technologies on the battlefield. There’s big money to be made in the defense industry, and a number of Silicon Valley players including Anduril and Palantir, as well as Eric Schmidt’s startup White Stork, have begun donating drone and AI technology to support the war in Ukraine.
Of course, the biggest concern of the skeptics is that this technology changes a lot of combat and makes it less intuitive; the military can allow the drone to strike indiscriminately from a distance and not fear return fire. Schmidt emphasized that the drones provided to Ukraine by his company remain “human-in-the-loop,” which means that a person always makes the final decision.
In a recent interview, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey was asked about the use of AI in weapons systems. “There is a shadow campaign being carried out at the United Nations by many of our enemies to deceive Western countries who like to conform to morality so that they do not use AI for weapons or defense,” he said. “What a moral victory it is to be forced to use larger bombs with more damage because we are not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past Russian or Chinese systems and hit accurately.”
Jamming systems are capable of jamming GPS and communications used to guide precision-guided munitions, but AI-powered drones can operate unmanned and identify targets without an operator giving a command.
Recent reports have suggested that the US is lagging behind adversaries including Russia and China in its ability to remotely disable enemy weapons using jamming technology. Russia has repeatedly disabled US-supplied precision-guided munitions to Ukraine using more advanced jamming technology than the US. The US could respond by investing heavily in avoiding GPS jamming so it doesn’t have to use indiscriminate, automated drones. Or it could try and get the Russians back.
Luckey called out critics who say a robot should never decide who lives and who dies. “And my point to them is, where is the moral high ground for a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of children and a Russian tank,” he asked. It seems unlikely that a school bus would be driving on a battlefield unless it was a booby trap, but whatever.
The battle has been slow, with both sides making little progress in recent months. Drones have helped Ukraine, but they are clearly not a panacea that both sides have access to.
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