Dear All, a few weeks ago we briefly spoke about the use of AI in morphometrics. In passing, we mentioned the problems with the environment, which are serious and will grow bigger. Of course, there are also serious ethical issues with the use of these tools.
As I was doing my weekly browsing of the recent 'non-morphometric' literature, I spotted this in Current Biology: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(26)00364-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.044 The article raises a number of important issues. I was particularly struck by a very recent example of misuse of AI (a brief excerpt from the article is below and more on that is easy to find in a recent paper by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian). I am sure many of you are better informed and already knew about this. I did not. Personally, I happily canceled my free account to that chat-bot and will go on with a, hopefully, moderate use of alternatives. All the best Andrea "... As Avner Gvaryahu, a former Director of the Israeli human rights organisation Breaking the Silence and now a researcher at the University of Oxford, has explained in a recent essay, the US and Israel were able to strike 1,000 targets during the first 24 hours of their attack because they “relied on AI systems to generate, prioritise and rank the target list at a speed no human team could replicate” (https://tinyurl.com/9f25bs38). One of those targets was the elementary school at Minab, where around 170 children died. Although the role of AI in this strike has not been confirmed officially, Gvaryahu writes that the building became a school ten years ago and that the infrastructure in which the target selection programmes operate has no reliable way of spotting this kind of error. ... Gvaryahu calls for legislators especially in Europe to regulate these companies as military contractors, rather than as technology providers for whom the military is just another customer. This issue came to the fore very briefly on February 27, when Anthropic asked to limit the use of its products b the Pentagon in two cases, specifically ruling out mass surveillance in the US and the deployment of weapons that kill without human oversight. The Trump administration responded by blacklisting Anthropic as a national security risk, while the competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, took over the Pentagon contract. In response to that, a movement called QuitGPT has called on users of the AI programme ChatGPT to cancel their subscriptions in an effort to avoid funding automated killing sprees in the Middle East." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Morphmet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/morphmet2/CAJ__j7PZbAD13ZZeE5KSpN%2Bg6y_uwKmcFwua8UnQYNnOJuBH0w%40mail.gmail.com.
