Post B4ql6csyzFKhOPkooy by cdarwin@c.im
 (DIR) More posts by cdarwin@c.im
 (DIR) Post #B4ql6csyzFKhOPkooy by cdarwin@c.im
       2026-04-01T03:07:22Z
       
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       The gap between what artificial intelligence promised and what the battlefield delivered has become the defining scandal of the Iran war. AI-powered targeting systems generated over 1,000 strike coordinates in the first 24 hours. AI simulations projected rapid regime collapse. AI logistics models forecast a 12-hour securing of the Strait of Hormuz. None of it happened as predicted. Thirteen American service members are dead, over 200 wounded, oil has breached $120 a barrel, and the regime in Tehran — far from collapsing — has installed a new supreme leader and triggered nationalist rallies rather than the pro-US uprising planners had expected. A growing body of evidence, drawn from leaked planning documents, academic research, and the testimony of intelligence professionals, suggests that the most consequential military operation of the twenty-first century may have been shaped less by strategic necessity than by a phenomenon researchers now call AI sycophancy — the tendency of large language models to tell their users exactly what they want to hearhttps://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/
       
 (DIR) Post #B4ql6eVewvrgQerDkG by david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
       2026-04-01T08:28:03Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @cdarwin I never thought I would boost an article from the Saudi Royal Family’s propaganda arm but, aside from the Anthropic-ad tone, this is quite on point. A couple of bits of context:This comes after the Saudis have pulled out of backing a load of ‘AI’ datacenter projects. Their money was important for making some of these possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve established a bunch of put positions and are now ready to cash in on the crash.Machine learning, as deployed in these models (other techniques don’t always have this property) is all about generating mostly correct outputs from statistical correlations. There are some places where this is really good. The deep neural networks for computer vision outperform every other approach because we don’t really understand the problem (can you unambiguously describe what a bicycle or a chair looks like, in a way that would let someone write a program that would recognise them from a picture where one is shown at any angle, partially occluded?) but we have loads of examples and so we can just throw them at a correlation system and get good results. And this works because the ground truth changes rarely. If you train a model with a hundred million pictures of trees, you are unlikely to see many new trees that don’t look quite like several of the images in the training set. War is very different because it is always an unusual set of conditions. No two wars are the same (there’s a line about the army always fighting the last war, because the things you learn in one conflict may not be applicable in the next). And you’re in an adversarial situation, where other people are intentionally trying to do things that you don’t expect (and therefore are things not present in any data building statistical models). This is why wargaming and military analysis usually depend on experts, not statistical models: there aren’t enough data points to build a good statistical model.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4qmrYKRqaoip9XbgO by jsbarretto@social.coop
       2026-04-01T09:49:55Z
       
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       @js @cdarwin The framing is specifically focusing on the US costs because that's the criteria with which the military apparatus are presumably judging these systems. The other stuff is important, but it's true of every conflict: the focus of the article is specifically about AI models backfiring, so that's why the framing is as it is.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4qmrZTLazWuN2iEC0 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
       2026-04-01T12:53:51Z
       
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       @jsbarretto @js @cdarwin Also, "long-term damage to the global supply chain" is not as tangible and immediately visible to a casual observer. People could dispute that it happened, or fail to understand what the author means by that.Meanwhile "oil price went up" is right there for everyone to see, clear as day. Noone's gonna doubt that it happened.