#violence
Moreover, the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield became impossible due to immediate drone attacks, which left them suffering for days or even weeks at times. Perhaps autonomous lethal weapons disgust us the most from an ethical point of view. The current discussions point out that autonomous weapons are unacceptable for two main reasons: they remove human oversight that separates the decision-maker from the consequences of their choices, and they deny the human dignity of the victim. The ethics of seeing from a drone, aka god’s eye view, which enables the conduct of war from a distance, is controversial in terms of the dehumanising effect of killing as a practice of manhunting. The execution of violence is outsourced to controlled semi-robots as an efficient way to eliminate the enemy while minimising the death toll among the members of the military powers.
At the same time, generating ISIS images on Stable Diffusion does not lead to images explicitly depicting acts of violence or bloodshed, even though those images can be found with the training data according to Have I Been Trained. A prompt containing ‘ISIS execution’ or ‘ISIS beheading’ may lead to a hooded militant lying on the ground, but with no overtly disturbing elements. My first attempts to generate ISIS-related images on Stable Diffusion took place in 2023, and they produced a distinctly different set of images than the slick and sanitized results one year later. The earlier attempts led to images that had certain photorealist elements – grain, texture – that elicited a feeling of genuine disturbance, similar to what I felt when I would look at ISIS videos. In this way, these results felt more ‘authentic’ than what can be produced today. But this feeling of ‘authenticity’ was confusing because the figures in these images were deformed, some lacking limbs or in awkward postures, clearly not real. Rationally, I knew that these images did not represent actual people, but were statistical renderings derived from a large sample of image data. But they disturbed me nonetheless because their appearances bore a trace of indexical reference to real images: images of real people, real lives, real deaths.
AI-assisted targeting systems may have allowed the military to target and kill at an unprecedented scale, as international media outlets have reported. However attention to developments on the ground evidences how all the violence was the result of concerted decisions: a prime minister ordering a campaign of destruction and a military echelon eager to heed his demands.