Figure 1: Will ChatGPT provide world dominance? (Composed using Canva)
There is an Ongoing Global Competition for Disruption and Gaining a Strategic Advantage
There is an ongoing competition to use Artificial Intelligence and related technologies to gain a strategic advantage between the three military superpowers or wannabes.
- "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [of Artificial Intelligence] will become the ruler of the world." Putin 2017
- "Chinese official documents and their enunciation of military doctrine indicate that the country's leaders see massive promise in AI's utility and are working to leverage this emerging technology into their force posture." (Bommakanti, 2020)
- "Emerging technologies are transforming warfare. The technological innovations expected to play increasingly important roles on future battlefields include artificial intelligence, sensors, unmanned air and ground systems, and cyber capabilities." (Weissmann & Nilsson, 2023)
Did we see one of these disruptions happening before our eyes at the beginning of 2023? The OpenAI product Chat GPT conquered the Internet with the speed of one million users in 5 days (Gartner, 2023) and 100 million monthly active users within two months after launch , and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, testimonies to US Congress that "AI could be as big as "the printing press" but acknowledged its potential dangers."
Possibly – but not the way you may first think!
Generative AI Meets the Lower Levels of Bureaucratic Creativity
Since 2015, OpenAI has been delivering breakthroughs in AI algorithms, competing successfully in human games and creating human-like content. Their release of ChatGPT 4.0 has impressed the world with abilities for conversation and logical text generation. For some of the users, ChatGPT 4.0 has appeared as an artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human-like consciousness to some of the users. Fortunately, that is not the case.
Generative AI can create content from given data. This content can be delivered in multiple modalities, like text (articles or answers to questions), images (photos or paintings), videos, and 3-D representations (scenes and landscapes for video games). Generated content has been winning digital-art awards and scoring among or close to the top 10 per cent of test takers in numerous tests, including the US exam for lawyers and the math, reading, and writing portions of the SATs, a college entrance exam used in the United States.
The ChatGPT is a combination of three functions:
- The user interface in the application defines Chatbot. So easy to use it can create an illusion of chatting with a human counterpart.
- Fine-tuned and continuously learning discussion engine. Fine-tuning adjusts the weights of the neural network or adds layers to help the model better understand the nuances of the task.
- The GPT model has a complex machine learning algorithm of a deep neural network with 96 layers managing around one trillion parameters . The statistic large language model (LLM) has been taught with more than 45 terabytes of human-produced text acquired from the Internet (over 300 km of bookshelf space, beyond any human to read through). The LLM has identified test patterns from this vast data and chooses the following word using the learned values and probabilities.
In summary, people use ChatGPT because it is convenient, replies fast and mostly rationally, and is available 24/7, unlike most human counterparts. (Based on ChatGPT answer through Bearly.ai interface 03. June 2023) Besides the convenient and funny private discussions, organisations are seeking several ways to benefit from the NLP and LLM. Financial services giant Morgan Stanley is testing the technology to help its financial advisers better leverage insights from the firm's more than 100,000 research reports. The government of Iceland has partnered with OpenAI in its efforts to preserve the endangered Icelandic language. Salesforce has integrated the technology into its popular customer-relationship-management (CRM) platform.
Military opportunities with generative AI
Can the ChatGPT provide an advantage in the assessment of the situation?
"The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand." Sun Tzu
No, but if military culture enforces rules, then the GPT model may be fine-tuned with digitised military rules, policies, doctrines, tactics, techniques and procedures, and an Officers Companion application can warn if an officer is going to deviate from the authorities when deciding.
Can the ChatGPT master adversary at the strategic or operational level?
"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Sun Tzu
No, statistical algorithms of large language models do not understand war at its different levels. Even though, if one trains a model with a large variety of tactical plans, there may be possible to generate combinations of these plans as graphs. Other AI algorithms are more proficient in strategy, gaming, and tactical confrontation than LLM.
Where may the military use the ChatGPT like generative artificial intelligence, then?
Suppose we use the Figure 3 military impact model which illustrated the evolution of the cyber environment. In that case, there are several apparent points where the military may benefit from generative AI:
- Man-Machine Interface (MMI) may be improved using Chatbot and LLM for translation of text and speech, free soldiers' hands from the keyboard of the battle management system, provide a dutiful companion for a lonely soldier in a trench to ease the anxiety or trauma, or act as a virtual instructor/trainer in the military metaverse.
- Generating content and establishing virtual relationships for information operations. For example,
"Russia has operationalised the concept of perpetual adversarial competition in the information environment by encouraging the development of a disinformation and propaganda ecosystem."
Generative AI provides affordable means to generate disinformation, and misinformation, and manipulate people through social media as the furthest-reaching weapon after intercontinental missiles. Furthermore, Cyber attackers may adopt new means to create more believable phishing emails, generate cyber-attacks, and craft new malware.
- Writing computer program code. Since computer application programming uses very abstract languages, Generative AI may translate applications from one programming language to another, create programs to solve coding problems, simplify code, write documentation, or test code to find failures.
"For many developers, generative AI will become the most valuable coding partner they will ever know."
As the military is becoming more software-defined, the generative AI may provide an edge for Armed Forces to establish their code factories.
- Generative AI can generate synthetic data based on patterns and relationships learned from actual data. Synthetic data may accelerate the learning of other AI algorithms, for example, to counter swarming drones, see faster the adversary behavioural pattern from clutter, or provide optimisation advice from a smaller amount of data points.
- Generative AI may enable the military to see a wider variety of options in the tactical situation through "machine hallucinations". Moreover, as generative models can use statistics from large amounts of data points, they may illustrate historical battleground schemas on the current tactical situation and expand these with other variations providing a broader foresight for tactical planners.
- Generative AI may be used for 3D object generation to accelerate military metaverse development, wargaming and simulation. The acceleration may create the next wave of revolution in military education (Chatman, 2009) and training, making the force generation able to execute continuous training more affordable and evolve the training content faster than currently. Furthermore, the ChatGPT may finally move the 2nd industrial teaching methods forward and have instructors focusing on critical-thinking and problem-solving skills rather than copying textbooks for answers.
The above, possibly surprising, impacts are not easy to achieve, however!
Military Challenges with Generative AI
The adoption of generative AI proliferates in commercial and open-source segments ; organisations must address several critical challenges to ensure the success of their Generative AI initiatives. These challenges may include:
- Data Management: Effective data management is critical to the success of generative AI, as models rely on high-quality, well-labelled data. Organisations must ensure that their data is accurate, consistent, correctly labelled, managed securely, and in compliance with relevant regulations.
- Model Complexity: Generative AI models can be complex and resource-intensive, requiring significant computing power and technical expertise. Creators must ensure they have the resources and skills to develop and deploy these models effectively. In addition, the acquisition may need to verify the function of algorithms before deployment.
- Like any analytical model, Generative AI has proven vulnerable to deliberate manipulation by sophisticated adversaries. For example, data poisoning - the data used to train the models may be manipulated, and adversarial attacks — feeding algorithms malicious inputs, may be used to counter AI-enhanced features.
- Ethical Considerations: As mentioned earlier, ethical considerations, such as bias and privacy, are becoming increasingly important in the development and deployment of generative AI. Creators must ensure their models are fair and transparent and respect user privacy in peacetime use.
Nevertheless, US DoD states that the U.S. public and private sectors cannot afford to pause their artificial intelligence pursuits amid an international race for technological supremacy.
Fear is relative!
A human composed this article using AI enhanced Google and Bing searches to find sources, Bearly to summarize found articles, provide different wording and have discussions along the writing process, Word writing assistant to guess the next word, Canvas to create graphics, and Grammarly to proof-read the text.
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