Ukraine uses facial recognition to ID dead Russian soldiers, Biden sends UAVs and USVs to Ukraine, and the Commerce Department fills out AI advisory committee

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Worth Knowing

Ukraine Uses AI to Identify Dead Russian Soldiers: Ukrainian officials are reportedly using facial recognition technology to identify dead Russian soldiers. As we covered last month, Clearview AI — the U.S. facial recognition company that has cultivated a vast database of more than 10 billion facial images, many of them scraped from social media sites — offered its tool to the Ukrainian government, free of charge. More than 340 Ukrainian officials across five government agencies have reportedly used Clearview’s tool to run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches. According to The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, those searches have been used to identify more than 580 dead Russian soldiers, enabling volunteers in the Ukrainian “IT Army” to notify the families of the deceased and, Ukrainian officials say, dispel the Russian narrative of a limited “special operation.” The practice has unnerved some observers — London-based researcher Stephanie Hare told Harwell that contacting soldiers’ families was “classic psychological warfare.” That would track with AI’s use throughout the war — concerns abound about potential “killer robots,” but AI has proven more potent as a psychological tool.
Despite Hopeful Signs, Experts Don’t Expect Chip Shortage to Abate: Prices for consumer GPUs are finally falling after nearly two years of scarcity, but experts say COVID shutdowns in China and raw material shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine make it likely that the chip shortage will continue. TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, raised its revenue forecast last week based on expectations that semiconductor supplies would remain tight through the end of the year. COVID lockdowns in Chinese cities, including Shanghai, contributed to the first drop in Chinese semiconductor output in more than two years, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spiked the cost of key raw materials, including palladium and neon. Recent AI advances have been built on the back of massive compute resources — high prices and tight supplies, especially as Nvidia prepares to roll out its next generation of datacenter chips, could put a serious damper on AI research.
Government Updates

Commerce Department Appoints Experts to AI Advisory Committee: Last week, the Commerce Department named 27 experts to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. The NAIAC, established by the National AI Initiative Act of 2020, is meant to advise the president and the National AI Initiative Office, provide recommendations and advice related to U.S. AI competitiveness, the state of AI research, AI ethics and bias, the makeup of the AI workforce and more, and offer feedback on the implementation of the National AI Initiative. The 27 appointed members of the NAIAC include Miriam Vogel of EqualAI, who will chair the committee, James Manyika of Google, who will serve as vice chair, and a number of experts with academic, business, and advocacy backgrounds — among them Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, a non-resident research fellow at CSET. The NAIAC is set to hold its first meeting on May 4 and will soon establish a subcommittee on AI and law enforcement, as mandated by the National AI Initiative Act.

United States Sends Air and Sea Drones to Ukraine: Last week, President Biden announced an additional $800 million military assistance package for Ukraine, which includes 300 Switchblade drones and an unspecified number of “unmanned coastal defense vessels.” The Switchblade is a loitering munition that comes in two models — the 300, which is small enough to fit in a rucksack and is used for targeting personnel, and the larger 600, which carries an anti-armor warhead. Both Switchblade models possess some autonomous capabilities, but experts say they likely don’t qualify as lethal autonomous weapons systems because they still require significant human input to target and engage enemies. The newest assistance package appears to be the biggest Switchblade shipment yet — a March package included 100 of the drones (both varieties) and an early April package added more. DOD Press Secretary John Kirby was tight-lipped when pressed for details about the “unmanned coastal defense vessels” also included in the newest package. He confirmed that the vessels would be coming from the U.S. Navy, but did not say whether the ships were armed or intended for non-combat roles.

GAO Reports on DOD and Navy AI Plans — Plus the Future of the JAIC: Two recent reports from the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about AI-related DOD and Navy plans and offered recommendations to improve their implementation:
  • The report on the DOD, released late last month, said the Pentagon’s AI-related strategies, including its 2018 AI Strategy, could be more comprehensive and proposed ways to improve future strategies and their implementation. The seven recommendations include developing a high-level roadmap that captures the department’s AI portfolio, establishing procedures and timelines for review of the DOD AI strategy, and establishing common terminology for AI activities. In a response to the GAO, the DOD concurred with all of the report’s recommendations.
  • The report on the Navy, meanwhile, found that the branch’s plans to spend $4.3 billion on 21 uncrewed vessels “does not account for the full costs to develop and operate these systems.” The report offered seven recommendations to improve its approach, including: completing a full estimate of the cost of developing and operating the systems, developing clear evaluation criteria for prototypes, and creating an entity in charge of overseeing the Navy’s uncrewed maritime systems portfolio. In its response, the Navy concurred with all of the report’s recommendations, but the GAO noted that the branch’s planned actions “do not fully address three of them.”  
The report on the DOD included two further pieces of information worth monitoring. According to an unnamed official from the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Pentagon intends to “formally stand down the JAIC by the end of fiscal year 2022.” The JAIC’s future has been unclear since the announcement of a new lead AI authority in December — the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. At the time, it was not publicly stated whether the JAIC would remain as-is or be merged with the new office of the CDAO. The official’s comment indicates that a merger is indeed in the cards, but the DOD has yet to officially announce any plans. The report also notes that JAIC officials say an updated 2018 DOD AI Strategy is expected to be issued this summer after the release of a new national defense strategy.

Marine Corps Modernization Plan Gets Pushback: A coalition of prominent retired generals has reportedly mobilized to quash the planned transformation of the Marine Corps. According to Politico’s Paul McLeary and Lee Hudson, the group — which includes former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Joseph Dunford (both retired Marine Corps four-star generals), and every living former commandant — has taken issue with the service branch’s Force Design 2030 plan. The plan, which builds on recommendations from the 2018 National Defense Strategy, calls for the Corps to retire some of its tanks and helicopters and embrace newer technologies, including unmanned air and ground systems. Its critics have argued in a series of opinion pieces that the pivot is too drastic and would damage the Corps’ capacity for combined-arms flexibility. So far, the Marine Corps’ leadership has stood behind the modernization project, but it remains to be seen how the 2022 National Defense Strategy will impact the plan, if at all.

In Translation
CSET’s translations of significant foreign language documents on AI

PRC Notice on “Foreign Experts”: Notice of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs on the Publication of a Trial Implementation Proposal for a Work Permit System for Foreigners in China. This notice is an exhaustively detailed description of the process by which “foreign experts” receive permission to work in China. The document specifies precisely what qualifications China requires of foreign experts of different grades, and enumerates and provides samples of all of the paperwork prospective Chinese employers must file on behalf of foreign employees.

If you have a foreign-language document related to security and emerging technologies that you’d like translated into English, CSET may be able to help! Click here for details.

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What’s New at CSET

PUBLICATIONSEVENT RECAPS
  • On April 14, CSET’s webinar Securing Tomorrow’s AI Workforce featured a conversation between CSET Research Fellow Diana Gehlhaus, Brookings Senior Fellow Nicol Turner Lee, New America Senior Analyst Shalin Jyotishi and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Chief Artificial Intelligence Architect and Applied Information Sciences Branch Head John Piorkowski, who discussed the steps the United States should take to ensure a robust AI and AI-literate workforce in the future. 
IN THE NEWS
What We’re Reading

Article: China uses AI software to improve its surveillance capabilities, Eduardo Baptista, Reuters (April 2022) 

Article: A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?, Steven Johnson, The New York Times (April 2022) 

Article: On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed, Emily M. Bender, Medium (April 2022)