{"id":134093,"date":"2026-09-22T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marinresists.com\/?p=134093"},"modified":"2026-09-22T13:31:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T20:31:54","slug":"a-spooky-near-confrontation-with-china-shows-the-real-danger-of-ai-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ms.now\/opinion\/us-china-ai-report-war-middle-east-nuclear","title":{"rendered":"A spooky near-confrontation with China shows the real danger of AI today"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the wake of spooky incidents<\/a> of artificial intelligence agents defying their creators\u2019 commands<\/a> and rules, the great fear of the day<\/a> is the prospect of rogue superintelligence that turns on humankind \u2014 and extinguishes it. But a recent incident in which the United States reportedly almost sparked a war with China based on false intelligence generated by AI reveals that there is a far more immediate threat to worry about: the fallibility of humans.<\/p>\n

CNN, citing four sources familiar with the episode, reported that<\/a> this spring a special operations command analyst put together an urgent intelligence report claiming that \u201ca Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.\u201d The implications of the report pushed the U.S. to serious action \u2014 members of the U.S. military were \u201cpreparing to board the ship\u201d and \u201cmilitary planes were in the air.\u201d But at the last minute officials dug a little further into the report and found that a chatbot the analyst had used had \u201cinaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.\u201d (U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to CNN\u2019s request for comment.)<\/p>\n

The U.S. was astonishingly close to a military confrontation with the world\u2019s second most powerful country based on what appears to have been an AI hallucination. That we got so close to accidentally triggering a global war should drive home the point that the imminent threat surrounding AI isn\u2019t some runaway malevolent superintelligent entity like Skynet<\/a> from the \u201cTerminator\u201d franchise. It\u2019s humans misusing AI.<\/p>\n

CNN reported that \u201cacross the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the U.S. collects and selecting targets for strikes to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.\u201d AI is probably useful for some of these data crunching tasks. But at the same time, we know chatbots are entirely unreliable<\/a> in their abilities to distinguish between things that are true and untrue, which is of course the entire point<\/em> of the enterprise of gathering intelligence. The problem here was with how the military used AI and failed to check sources, not AI itself. (CNN reported that it\u2019s unclear if the chatbot used was a commercial one or one internal to the military.)<\/p>\n

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AI isn\u2019t being used to intelligently assist human effort, but rather cheaply substitute for it in tasks where it is inappropriate to do so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

In low-stakes scenarios, the inability of AI to reliably ascertain facts is mostly just a nuisance. For example, companies might decide that using chatbots to provide customer service to people seeking information on merchandise they bought from a website is worth the costs of some customers and workers receiving inaccurate information, because they work well enough most of the time while reducing costs. (My suspicion is, however, that the rising presence of shoddy AI in our daily lives is contributing to the rising negative sentiment<\/a> surrounding it.)<\/p>\n

But there are many scenarios in which the accuracy of information is paramount \u2014 and yet people are using AI with unwarranted trust in these scenarios anyway.<\/p>\n

Journalism is about reporting the truth \u2014 and yet prominent journalists have used AI-hallucinated quotes.<\/a> The law requires a careful reading of the law and appraisal of precedent, and yet due to AI, lawyers have cited hallucinated cases<\/a> and judges have issued opinions using fake quotes and incorrect case outcomes.<\/a> The purpose of education is to learn, yet both students and teachers are delegating the tasks<\/a> of writing papers and grading them<\/a> to AI. Perhaps my favorite recent example is that a new book intended to shed light on AI\u2019s relationship with truth turned out to be filled with AI-fabricated quotes.<\/a><\/p>\n

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