FactFinderAI, Jewish Onliner and the accounts were also found to be connected to pro-Israeli activists, in one case an Israeli woman long active in hasbara and working with https://Act.il.
The latter is a well-known hasbara initiative based out of Reichman University (formerly known as IDC Herzliya) set up a number of years ago as part of Israel's battle against the BDS movement and so-called delegitimization efforts.
According to documents obtained by Haaretz, one of https://Act.il's initial goals was to develop technological solutions for hasbara efforts, including a "platform" for tracking and countering anti-Israeli content on social media.
Just on the purely software engineering side of things (free Palestine!), this is the problem with AI. A piece of software with non-deterministic results will do strange things. Testing and robustness becomes exponentially harder. We need to thing hard about that before they are driving cars.
think*. As I get older, the software I like best is the simplest, easy to understand solution. AI does some pretty amazing stuff but man there are some crazy unknowns.
Comments
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2025-01-29/ty-article/.premium/pro-israel-bot-goes-rogue-calls-idf-soldiers-white-colonizers-in-apartheid-israel/00000194-ae81-def2-afdc-eeab470d0000