Ukraine is using millions of hours of drone footage to train artificial intelligence for war

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may represent the first true AI war, as both sides have come to rely on small drones to conduct reconnaissance, identify targets, and even drop deadly bombs on enemy lines. This new type of warfare allows commanders to survey an area from a safe distance, and has highlighted the importance of lightweight air weapons that can carry out precision strikes rather than more expensive fighter aircraft. A single drone costing $15,000 can shoot down an F-16 costing tens of millions.

Reuters He has a look About how Ukraine is collecting massive amounts of video footage from drones to improve the effectiveness of its drone brigades.

The story includes an interview with Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian non-profit system that centralizes and analyzes video from more than 15,000 drones on the front lines. Dmitriev said Reuters That the system has collected more than two million hours of battlefield video since 2022. “This is food for AI: If you want to teach AI, give it two million hours (of video), it will become something supernatural.” He said.

The OCHI system was originally designed to give the military access to drone footage from all nearby crew members on a single screen, but the group running it realized the video could be used to train artificial intelligence. For an AI system to be effective in determining what it sees, it needs to review a lot of footage; Ukraine may not have had much battlefield footage before 2022. Now, more than six terabytes of data are added to the system daily, on average.

Another system called Avengers, which collects footage from drones, has been able to detect 12,000 pieces of Russian equipment a week using artificial intelligence, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

It’s not just local Ukrainian companies that are building new AI technology on the battlefield. There is big money to be made in the defense industry, and a slew of Silicon Valley players, including Anduril and Palantir, as well as Eric Schmidt’s startup White Stork, have begun providing drone technology and artificial intelligence to support the fight against Ukraine.

Of course, the biggest worry for skeptics is that these technologies automate much of the combat and make it somewhat abstract; The military may be willing to allow the drone to launch one or more indiscriminate strikes Committing war crimes When a real human being on the battlefield wouldn’t do it. Schmidt stressed that the drones his company provides to Ukraine keep “the human in the loop,” meaning the person always makes the final decision.

In a The last interviewAnduril’s Palmer Luckey was asked about the use of AI in weapons systems. “There is an ongoing campaign being waged by many of our opponents at the United Nations to deceive Western countries who imagine themselves to be morally aligned with not using AI in weapons or defence,” he said. “What a moral victory there is in forcing us to use bigger bombs with more collateral damage because we are not allowed to use systems that can penetrate previous Russian or Chinese jamming systems and hit them accurately.”

Jamming systems are capable of jamming GPS and telecommunications used to guide precision-guided weapons, but AI-powered drones It can operate without a drone And setting targets without the operator giving the command.

Recent reports indicate that the United States has done so I fell behind the opponents Including Russia and China in their ability to remotely disable enemy weapons using jamming technology. Russia has repeatedly disabled precision-guided weapons provided by the United States to Ukraine using jamming technology more advanced than that of the United States. The United States could respond by investing more in GPS jamming avoidance, so that it does not have to use more random drones. Or it could try to stymie the Russians again.

Loki clearly took aim at critics who say a robot should never decide who lives and who dies. He asked: “My point to them is: Where is the moral high ground on a landmine that cannot distinguish between a school bus full of children and a Russian tank?” It seems unlikely that a school bus would drive onto a battlefield unless it was a booby trap, but whatever.

The war has been slow and both sides have made little progress in recent months. Drones have helped Ukraine, but they are clearly not a panacea for both sides.