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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

theguardian.com

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Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#341

Post by Denzel »

jvanderbot wrote: post #115
Denzel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it. > there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Abse…

I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once. > . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. > The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during t…

Thanks for point-by-point.

Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.

And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.

These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.

> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?

This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.

“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.

For a historical analog that involved killing US children “unintentionally”, you can read up on the Ludlow Massacre - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefe...

Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#342

Post by DoctorOetker »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #119
jdross wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.

That's a non excuse. I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire. The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those…

Technically the statutes of Rome forbid using human shields.

A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.

I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.

Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.

IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.

IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#343

Post by DoctorOetker »

tootie wrote: post #301
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely been reported before that Claude was used for Iran attacks, at the beginning of March or earlier: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/01/claude-an... Edit: Also, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

Amodei looks absolutely prescient for taking a stand against use of Claude in the kill chain. Not to mention how utterly foolish DoD looks declaring Claude to be a national security threat while simultaneously using to choose targets. No wonder they got humiliated in court.

Well, to people who don't believe in precognition, it sounds like Anthropic had quality control engineers dedicated to their military clients' usage. Basically running through the prompts and inspecting the answers and digging deeper how their chatbots gave those answers. Somebody must have pressed the high-alert button, resulting in Anthropic taking a stance.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#344

Post by efreak »

epolanski wrote: post #335
tootie wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China will be worse. Either Europe steps up or we just try living life without a hegemon.

Why do I have to keep believing China will be worse? It's not china mass survelling the planet, the US is. It's not china starting wars, kidnapping foreign leaders, it's the US. It's not china threatening their allies, not even going short of mentioning annexations, the US is.

China does these things to their own citizens, so really only better for those out of range.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#346

Post by DoctorOetker »

shykes wrote: post #337
jLaForest wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the video of men pulling children's severed body parts out of the rubble. What caused the explosion? Again there's a video showing an American tomahawk middle hitting the building... Why so much equivocating? It's shameful

Are you familiar with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza? We've been through this sort of circus before... Those of us who paid attention learned to not rush to conclusions, and never, ever trust social media or the western press to overcome or even understand information warfare.

> Are you familiar with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza?

I am not

> Those of us who paid attention learned to not rush to conclusions, and never, ever trust social media or the western press to overcome or even understand information warfare.

Since you highlight western press can't be trusted to overcome / understand information warfare, would you care to provide some write-ups detailing the viewpoints you hint at, in the context of this Al-Ahli hospital incident?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#347

Post by dang »

csmpltn3 wrote: post #287
dang wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't post slurs here. We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . (p.s. I'll add, since this always come up, that yes this standard applies regardless of who is being slurred.)

Could not care any less. Who else have you banned here? How about you also ban the rest of the Christian/Jew-hating regalia that's on this thread? Or are you too woke for that?

We certainly ban accounts that post like you did against other groups. Here's an example from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532748.

We need specific links, though. People always assume that we see the same posts they do—in fact we don't come close to seeing everything (even in the same thread) and rely on users to tell us about the worst comments.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#348

Post by Dylan16807 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #298
Dylan16807 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you answer the question though? It's not a trick question, I want to see where you're coming from. And it's not about whether it's "okay".

I didn’t answer it because you’re framing it as the end-all be-all of this discussion when it’s bordering on a strawman argument.

Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.

For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.

I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#349

Post by Dylan16807 »

cramsession wrote: post #228
Dylan16807 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.

> Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Killing children is a war crime, and not an inevitable part of war.

On purpose or with significant negligence, it's a war crime. But collateral damage is not something you can just choose to avoid.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#350

Post by tovej »

leereeves wrote: post #294
dylan604 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US claims that there was a threat of attack What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now t…

> If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets A reasonable belief, because Iran in fact responded to the US+Israeli strikes by attacking US allies and even neutral nations like Qatar. And why should we doubt that Iran would have closed the Strait of Hormuz even if the US had not attacked, leaving Israel to attack alone? The strategic calculation (threaten the world eco…

Qatar is not a neutral nation. It is a US ally, and the US army has a big presence there, inclusing CENTCOM forward headquarters and air operations.

The largest US base in the region is an air base in Qatar (which Iran has hit).

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