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Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. (Photo Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON – Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall today called on the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board to immediately begin research into the potential impact of “generative” artificial intelligence, such as the increasingly popular AI program ChatGPT. announced.
“I asked the Scientific Advisory Board to actually do two things with AI. It was about putting together a small team to get it done quickly,” he said in an online interview with the Center for a New American Security. CNAS). “However, we want a more permanent AI-focused group that explores collections of AI technologies, citing and de-citing them to help us understand them and find ways to adopt them as soon as possible. The purpose is to organize.”
The Board met on June 15 to review the progress of ongoing research that is due to be completed next month.
For now, Kendall said, ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence systems that can create entirely new text, code, and images, rather than classifying and highlighting existing ones, are poised for prime time. I emphasized no.
“Right now, I think the utility of this kind of AI in the military is limited. Is that the case? [It] In terms of the veracity of what it produces, it is unreliable,” he said. “There is still a way to go before we can rely on such tools, for example, to carry out operational orders.”
Former Pentagon AI officials have previously expressed concerns about generative AI, particularly the current technology’s tendency to “hallucinate” information. And in May, Craig Martell, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, also said he was “deadly scared” of the potential use of AI for highly effective disinformation.
Nonetheless, Kendall said, “For some of the work we do, we may be able to help you if you’d like.”
But for the most part, the Department of Defense’s interest in AI “is centered around things like pattern recognition, targeting, and classification of many Intel functions, where neural networks and machine learning can be very useful,” he explained. bottom. “Today, what we call AI offers is much faster processing speeds and the ability to process more data. It’s progress, but it has revolutionary potential in terms of the features it offers.”
Kendall stressed that these kinds of AI tools to aid decision-making are already being deployed in the commercial world and will inevitably be deployed in military systems.
“[T]I think what people really don’t fully understand is that those technologies are happening whether you want them or not,” he said. “They will all come in and be used. They will give us additional capabilities.”
U.S. military commanders have been pushing for such AI decision support for several years to outmaneuver their adversaries, not only in all areas of future warfare operations, but also in the “gray zone” race on the brink of conflict. I’ve been asking
And in February, Martell launched a global command and control (JADC2) concept designed to embody the U.S. military’s ambitious Joint All-Area Command and Control (JADC2) concept for machine-speed combat on land, air, sea, and space. The Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series was reactivated. cyber domain. His GIDE series, coming for the first time in 2021, will focus on using AI and machine learning technology to task sensors and target shooters.
So, Kendall explained, the goal is to quickly bring AI technology into the field while also addressing ethical considerations.
“Humans will continue to play a role and take responsibility for what actions are taken. Humans will also participate in the decision-making process so that decisions can be made in an operationally efficient manner. And we need to make sure that those technologies are applied in an ethical and responsible way,” he said. “And we have to be very smart about how we write our requirements so that we have the opportunity for these technologies to participate and address all the issues that we just talked about. We can find paths and put them into the hands of users.” Combatants they can gain an edge on. “
