After the "Al-Aqsa flood" and the start of the brutal bombardment of the Gaza Strip this October, one of the controversial photos circulated on social media, showing (1) an Israeli soldier as if he was a Hollywood superhero, holding in his hands two infants he allegedly saved from Hamas after Hamas militants kidnapped them and deposited them inside a closet in the Gaza Strip. Although the image was widely circulated, it was later found to be generated by artificial intelligence tools.
This kind of disinformation is what prompted British AI scientist Demis Hasabis to state (2): "We have to take AI risks as seriously as we deal with the climate crisis," adding that this super new technology has another dark face different from what we know about it, as it can become a tool for killing and contribute to the manufacture of biological weapons, and above all its capabilities can be used to manipulate minds and direct Public opinion through written and visual content generation techniques that are used as an effective means in "information warfare".
In fact, the information age (3) has contributed to making the world we live in a more ambiguous place, and with the existence of such technologies, we can no longer trust the news and stories presented to us, especially after the media was filled with unconfirmed speculation and false and fabricated news, which we see today evident in the war waged by the Israeli occupation on the Gaza Strip.
In May 40, (2021) the Israeli occupation army described the "Guardian of the Walls" battle launched by the occupation forces on the Gaza Strip as the first "artificial intelligence war" in the world, as this high technology contributed according to Israeli officials (4) to doubling the strength of the Israeli army during the 5-day fighting, thanks to automatic weapons, spyware and tools to track and monitor Palestinians. These same allegations have been repeated in the past few days to describe the attacks currently being carried out by the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip under the name of Operation Iron Swords, but this time the reason is different. The same approach used to track and engage targets on the ground has also been used in cyberspace to target audiences and steer public opinion.
A good example of this is what happened on October 7, coinciding with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when the international community was surprised by the allegations (6) made by the Israeli occupation army and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, accusing members of the Palestinian resistance movement (Hamas) of beheading 40 infants.
Hamas denied the Israeli version, but this "small misinformation" spread like wildfire and was circulated by international news agencies as a confirmed fact, especially after US President Joe Biden confirmed it, claiming that he saw the pictures of the decapitated infants himself, a statement that the White House then retracted and denied seeing any images. According to a report (7) issued by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, the Israeli occupation army did not provide any evidence to support the validity of its claims, despite the passage of more than 20 days since the start of the war.
The Israeli allegations did not stop there, and this time the image of a charred infant was used inside an Israeli hospital, rumored to be of a child victim of the seventh of October, which caused public opinion against the Palestinian resistance, but the examination of the image (8) turned out to be also produced by artificial intelligence programs.
(AI debunks Netanyahu's lie by posting a photo claiming to be of an Israeli child)
Israel's information warfare takes many forms (9), spreading false and misleading information at times, and distorting the public image of political opponents at other times, all part of a propaganda war process aimed at promoting a certain point of view and shaping public opinion. Israel has systematically exploited the digital transformation witnessed by various media outlets, and how social media has become a tool for sharing news, and used this in its information war on Gaza over the past decade to serve its military objectives, which we can see its effects in the war inside the Strip now.
Army of robots
Over the past two centuries, the image has been the most reliable medium for conveying news of wars, as we have learned about the horror of battles from the images taken by early war photographers in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when we discovered death again reflected on photographic paper, and we contemplated through it the inhumanity of man, as Perry Sanders says in his book "The Disappearance of the Human Being" (10), until we trusted and believed the image.
The era of deepfakes of photographs and audio recordings has come to strike this trust and credibility in death, as it belies what our eyes see and our ears hear, and this is the crisis we are experiencing today in our digital world connected to the Internet. James Briddle criticizes the information age that we live in his book "A New Dark Age", saying that the problem does not lie in the lack of information, but in its excessive increase, and (11) Internet culture has allowed us to easily share photos and videos on social networking sites without verifying their authenticity, especially if these images flirt with the feelings of the masses and provide influential and coherent stories, and for this reason misinformation spreads more.
The AI revolution has deepened this problem, resulting in an increase in the overall rate of disinformation. Today we are witnessing tools that "fabricate" images in a few minutes, and conversation "bots" that can generate news from nothing, which changes the rules of the war game forever (12). To counter this torrent of fake news, social media platforms, led by the technology giant Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, have taken the necessary measures to remove violating and harmful content (13), but that authority, which is supposed to be used to combat disinformation, has been used as a tool of censorship and muzzling since Israel launched its war on Gaza.
Social media has waged a parallel war in which it has cut out pro-Palestinian content, classifying it as disinformation or incitement to violence, while posts supporting Israel's brutal bombing are encouraged by social media algorithms, enabling them to appear more effectively. This is what Alice Gecker referred to when he talked about the "armies of robots" of artificial intelligence that filter content, and determine whether it is pro-Israel or against it, if it is with Israel, an army of robots will generate a torrent of positive reactions from likes and shares, but if the content is against it, those robots will report it so that this unwanted content does not receive any interaction (14).
Baptist bombing and information wars
Things didn't stop there. When the shelling of Gaza's Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital took place on October 17, the Israeli army spokesperson claimed that the rocket causing the humanitarian tragedy was the result of a failed Islamic Jihad rocket launch, based on two claims: satellite videos and photos, and the other was an audio recording said to be of a phone call between a former Hamas member and a resident of the Strip. In the validity of both.
For its part, (16) The New York Times conducted an extensive analysis of the videos contained in the Israeli version, noting that two explosions occurred near the Baptist Hospital within two minutes of the bombing, and doubted that the rocket that appeared in the video and on which Israeli officials based their narrative was the cause of the hospital explosion.
At the same time, media coverage (17) confirmed that the rocket that hit the Baptist Hospital had landed vertically, which contradicts the Israeli version that it was fired from a cemetery near the hospital. As for the phone call, the audio recording (18) released by Israel was also met with doubt by experts, as (19) the British Channel Four conducted an investigation that questioned that the dialect used in the recording was the local dialect of the residents of the Gaza Strip, which opens the door to a strong possibility that the recording was fabricated, which is fully consistent with the counterfeiting practices in which the Israeli occupation state has repeatedly fallen since the beginning of the war.
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