My guess is that OpenAI has been doing more and more domestic spying type work as well as more and more military work - target selection and the like.
That's how the schoolhouse was blown up by a Tomahawk. An AI was fed old information, didn't realize or do proper validation, an analyst copy-pasted, then someone just punched the coordinates into the their control station and hit "fire".
It also wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI et al are being pressured to work with Israelis for targeting and analysis, too, since their "black box" AI that was doing terrorist acid tests and assigning bombing targets has proven nearly useless.
But with two competing claims, and no easy way to check ground truth, you absolutely ask for citations from both sides. There's nothing rational about uncritically accepting the narrative you heard first.
Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.
It's not. I have no idea how you got there.
The right thing is to seek evidence for both perspectives. This is ironically not rocket science. Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so, but especially don't pretend to sneering objectivity when you do so.
> Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so
Exactly. That's why they asked for a citation. A response providing such citation is more appropriate than essentially saying "well you didn't ask for a citation from $other_side either".
I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.
A bar? Too small an organization; if they had an ethics team I'd just think they were a money laundering front.
Frankly, most organizations above the size of an average mom & pop operation like a local bar should have at least some formal consideration of ethics, and most larger than (say) 50 employees should have at least one dedicated ethicist on staff. With veto power over operations.
Our society has treated ethics like the exclusive domain of ivory tower eggheads and philosophers for far too long, and look at what it has led to. If nearly everyone knew an ethicist in their daily lives, maybe people would actually have some understanding of ethics, even if they only did it grudgingly.
Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political leadership of this country whose support of Raytheon is fundamental to their survival
Lets do assume this is true, then again, wouldn't Raytheon be the best place to actually have a ethics department, if anyone?
They don't have anything to do about using the products they sell. Neither does Boeing, or Lockheed, or Tesla, or SpaceX.
The idea to bomb that girls school may have came from Grok, but a card carrying, uniform wearing member of the US military agreed it was the thing to do.
Where was the US military ethics team? Hegseth dismissed them earlier in the year to help with 'lethality'.
(in all reality, the intelligence was old. the database said the building was a military target, so it was sorted and assigned. intelligence is old and leaky and full or errors). a mistake. a tragic mistake, but not a deliberate act.
Most people don't like to do evil (even if the money is good) so allowing an economy of scale around morale reassurance is rational. This obviously breaks down if the company is seen to hide things from that department or if that department is clearly, themselves, unethical. The first of those conditions are why ethics departments at Meta and OpenAI have very little efficacy.
1. Outside of extreme circumstances where it has been mandated to be a specific regulatory board because of past actions or fear of future actions in which case it's better viewed as part of the bureaucracy of the governing body (usually the state, sometimes a shareholder or other concerned party).
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair
Think I first saw that on a usenet post, as true now as then and just as true as it was in the 1930's when he wrote it (in at least that form).