Do you have any evidence whatsoever 'the bad guys' were developing GAN AI based image recognition drones despite the extremely low ability for low powered image recognition models to accurately identify toast, much less people in camouflage in a crowded visual environment?

I hate to break it to you but the development of AI weapon systems was always an inevitability. It has been an inevitability since the first ape hit another ape with a rock.

Now we can decide, collectively, that we don't want to permit the use such weapons. I'd certainly support such a decision. We can treat them like nuclear weapons, something that should be too dangerous to contemplate using. We can work to put in place international safeguards against their use. Those would be good goals to work towards. But they didn't suddenly spring into existence because of some guy in Ukraine, and acting like they did is ignorant and asinine.

If you're under the impression that this is, somehow, a one-sided development on Ukraine's part - that Russia, along with every other major military power in the world, is not currently racing to develop their own autonomous weaponry - then you either have an insanely optimistic view of the world, or you're a Russian propagandist. The only reason Ukraine is the first country we've heard of using such weapons is because they're in such a desperate situation that deploying untested military hardware directly into battle makes sense. One of the key advantages they've been able to hold over the Russians is how rapidly they iterate on their technology, but that advantage comes from an approach of building small production runs, testing them directly in the field and then reviewing the results. They do this with their drones, with their anti-drone defenses, and everything else besides. It's not a safe, careful, thoughtful way of doing things, but it is effective, and when you're facing total annihilation you will always choose effective over safe.

If you want to stand up for the idea that autonomous weapons are too dangerous to be allowed to exist, you won't hear any disagreement from me. But if all you want to do is wag your finger at people fighting for their lives then you really to stop and consider whether this comes from a place of genuine concern for the world, or just a need to feed your own sense of moral superiority.

Depends on what you are talking about. Using an AI to work out 'viable' targets during the planning stage? That's how you end up blowing up an Iranian girls school. Using AI to highlight vehicles and steer the drone into them after the command is given? That is becoming a necessity in Ukraine, where the jamming and other counter measures make remotely flying drones more and more difficult.

I think the main advantage is the drone, once locked onto a target, cannot be jammed. Both sides have a bunch of handheld jammers, as well as bigger vehicle mounted ones, which is why this and fibre optic drones are so common.

You'd hope there wouldn't be any school children in the middle of a war zone.

Signal jamming and disruption. The main perk of the autonomous drone is that it can continue functioning after losing contact. That is at least what I understood as one of the main drivers behind autonomous drone usage in Ukraine.

Send 1000 drones to an area.

Program them to understand what different types of targets look like, basic maps, etc.

Program them to know what a destroyed target looks like.

Instead of 1000 drones attacking one target over and over, you get a swarm of drones moving on from destroyed targets and they can’t be stopped by communication jammers.

You can have swarms of drones that gather data and feed it to eachothers continuously, each making decisions individually and as a swarm, like a swarm of bees but million times as destructive, of course.

But it's just simply that 2 computers can communicate between eachothers so much faster and more efficiently than having humans in the loop

Also this allows far better autonomous operation, quite like sending an elite team somewhere they have to operate with zero contact back home

But yes, it's also really fucking terrifying thought people have actually built these things and thought it's a good idea

Also one guy in a chair per drone is not enough with the amount of targets present. Image recognition and value/hit probability (AI) lets one guy pilot many drones (in theory, haven't seen that yet) and still have the final say whether he wants to hit the targets it suggests.

Potentially lets you use drones farther too, find and track a target while it's flying high, confirm the thing manually, then fly below the radio horizon until it hits said target.

Isn't the problem jamming when you have remote operation so the AI doing this self sufficiently does not need a signal anymore.

Perhaps these can be jammed too but this was part of the tech race in this war. It's why they used fiber glass cables.

radio and satellite communication jamming has resulted in fiber optic drones. Autonomous permits longer range from safer control room, on general area to deploy to.