Q&A: PENTAGON AI CHIEF ON NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE GENERATIVE AI CHALLENGES

The Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence offer, Craig Martell, is alarmed by the potential for generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT to deceive and sow disinformation. His talk on the technology at the DefCon hacker convention in August was a huge hit. But he’s anything but sour on reliable AI.

The Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence offer, Craig Martell, is alarmed by the potential for generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT to deceive and sow disinformation. His talk on the technology at the DefCon hacker convention in August was a huge hit. But he’s anything but sour on reliable AI.

Not a soldier but a data scientist, Martell headed machine-learning at companies including LinkedIn, Dropbox and Lyft before taking the job last year.

Marshalling the U.S. military’s data and determining what AI is trustworthy enough to take into battle is a big challenge in an increasingly unstable world where multiple countries are racing to develop lethal autonomous weapons.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR MAIN MISSION?

A: Our job is to scale decision advantage from the boardroom to the battlefield. I don’t see it as our job to tackle a few particular missions but rather to develop the tools, processes, infrastructure and policies that allow the department as a whole to scale.

Q: SO THE GOAL IS GLOBAL INFORMATION DOMINANCE? WHAT DO YOU NEED TO SUCCEED?

A: We are finally getting at network-centric warfare -- how to get the right data to the right place at the right time. There is a hierarchy of needs: quality data at the bottom, analytics and metrics in the middle, AI at the top. For this to work, most important is high-quality data.

Q: HOW SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT AI USE IN MILITARY APPLICATIONS?

A: All AI is, really, is counting the past to predict the future. I don’t actually think the modern wave of AI is any different.