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- Hacker News
- While I think that it's important to do root cause analysis, we need to be very careful not to absolve blame from the people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI. An AI can't be tried in a court. There has to be a responsible human for everyone one of its actions, especially when it's killing (-people-) children.
I cannot believe this has come to pass.
by colingauvin - Israel has heavily used AI targeting in Gaza as well.[0]
The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.
In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.
Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).
- > Deadliest American military targeting error
Also known as mass murder
Seriously, that's one way to sanitize hat happened.
by Aeolun - In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
by drakonka - Personally I'm more interested in the justification for the second and third strikes.
There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.
- Opinion: AI was set up as the fall guy from day one.
The murders continue and a certain mindset demands a fall guy for everything.
Iran itself was blamed.
This was a criminal activity ultimately in the hands of humans, explaining the extreme sanctions being placed on the ICC.
by k310 - Many people are commenting that AI is just a scapegoat here and really this is a story about military incompetence. What I think is probably more interesting is how AI enables incompetent people to do more damage than they would otherwise. Two things can be true at once, the military can be incompetent, and AI can be used to make targeting decisions that are wrong - we can understand both the new world that we live in, and the absolution of responsibility it offers without ignoring these nuances.by kamranjon
- > It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.
The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.
by legitster