Truth or Fiction? US Air Force Shoots Down AI Homicide Tale

US Air Force Denies That AI Drone Killed One Of Their Operators

The US Airforce has revealed that a recent viral story in which a US colonel claimed that an operator had been killed by an AI-driven drone was false. The Air Force claims that the colonel had ‘misspoken’ and that no such incident had happened.

At a meeting hosted by the Royal Aeronautical Society on May 24th, Colonel Tucker Hamilton, the US Air Force’s chief of AI test and operations, delivered a keynote address.

In his address, the colonel discussed a simulation in which a human drone operator repeatedly prevented an AI-enabled drone from successfully destroying surface-to-Air Missile sites.

In the end, he claimed, the AI-controlled drone destroyed the communication tower so that the operator could no longer communicate with it, despite having been programmed not to kill the operator.

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The story quickly went viral bringing scrutiny into the US Airforce over a probable cover-up for the said ‘operator’ attack by the drone. However, Colonel Tucker on Thursday, broke his silence revealing that his remarks were not a recount of real-life events.

“We’ve never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realize that this is a plausible outcome,” he said. Colonel Tucker proceeded to reiterate that the said incident was a “thought experiment” rather than an actual event.

According to Insider, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokesperson confirmed Colonel Tucker’s claims on the alleged “thought experiment.”

“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to the ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” she said, adding that, “it appears the colonel’s comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”

AI In the US Defense Forces

In recent years, the US military has increasingly been experimenting with AI and its application in the field. This includes an F-16 fighter jet where in 2020, the AI-controlled fighter plane beat a human adversary during a competition hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

According to Wired, the Department of Defense successfully completed the first real-world test flight of an F-16 with an AI pilot in late 2022 as part of a project to create a new autonomous aircraft by the end of 2023.

However, while the US military seems to be embracing AI technology like many other sectors and industries, there are those that are not fans of AI in the military.

This includes Professor Yoshua Bengio, recognized by many as one of the AI ‘godfathers’ who thinks that AI should not be allowed in the military. According to Prof Bengio, the military is “one of the worst places where we could put a super-intelligent AI”.