Israel uses AI to spy on Palestinians

The Israeli military’s military intelligence unit 8200, which specializes in cyber and information warfare, has developed an AI program similar to ChatGPT using intercepted conversations and messages from Palestinians to enhance its espionage capabilities.

According to research by the Guardian and several other media outlets, the system, which is trained on Arabic colloquial language processing, can provide analysis of the intelligence data and answer questions about individuals under Israeli surveillance.

According to sources familiar with the project, the unit began building the model to create a sophisticated chatbot-like tool capable of answering questions about people it is monitoring and providing insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data it collects.

The efforts to build the large language model (LLM) – a deep learning system that generates human-like text – were partially revealed in a little-noticed public talk by a former military intelligence technologist who said he oversaw the project.

“We tried to create the largest dataset possible [and] collect all the data the state of Israel has ever had in Arabic,” the former official, Chaked Roger Joseph Sayedoff, told an audience at a military AI conference in Tel Aviv last year. The model, he said, required “psychotic amounts” of data.

Research shows that the program is used to track human rights activists, monitor Palestinian construction in the West Bank and analyze people's everyday conversations.

Human rights experts have warned that the system could lead to deepening prejudice and arbitrary decision-making against Palestinians.

A Human Rights Watch researcher warned: The system is just a tool for guessing, but these guesses can lead to criminalization of individuals.

The Israeli regime has previously used AI tools such as "The Gospel" and "Lavender" to target Palestinians in the Gaza war and is now trying to upgrade its spying systems to a higher level.

The vast scale of the model suggests that Unit 8200 stores vast volumes of intercepted communications; like many intelligence agencies, it seeks to use artificial intelligence technologies to perform sophisticated analysis and process the information it continuously collects.

Big American tech companies have quietly empowered the Israeli regime to track and target many more people more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon, using artificial intelligence and computing services. This has led to a surge in civilian deaths and heightened concerns that these tools are playing a significant role in the deaths of innocent people.

According to an Associated Press report, the Israeli military has for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel’s recent wars provide a prominent example of how commercial American-made AI models have been used in active warfare; This is despite concerns that these models are essentially designed to help decide who should live and who should be targeted.