kyiv authorities say they are using the details they obtain through this process to try to track down and notify the families of dead soldiers, which they say is aimed at violating Russia’s restrictions on the dissemination of information about the war. .
While this type of AI can bring comfort to bereaved families denied by the Kremlin’s secrecy, the potential for mistakes is high and the consequences are also significant.
“If you are the father of a Russian soldier and you are told that your son was killed while he was still alive, that presents a complex ethical dilemma,” says Jim Hendler, director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mikhailo Fedorov wrote on Wednesday that his country uses “artificial intelligence” to search social media for profiles of Russian soldiers using photos of their corpses and then inform their families and loved ones of their deaths, adding that One of the goals of the technology is to dispel the myth of the special operation that the Kremlin is fighting in Ukraine instead of describing its operations as a war.
Ukrainian authorities did not respond to requests for more information about Fedorov’s statement.
The latest balance released by the Kremlin spoke of the death of just under 500 soldiers in the fighting, but no official balance has been published for weeks, while NATO officials estimate the number of Russian soldiers killed, wounded or missing or the that are no longer. they can no longer participate in battles, fighting up to 40,000.
“We can imagine a circumstance where the ability to reduce the number of missing in war would be really beneficial,” he says, though facial recognition may not be the right solution, he says.
The company, which was fined 20 million euros by Italy earlier this month for its software, claimed that its database contains around two billion images from the VK platform, which is the equivalent of Facebook in Russia. and could help identify the dead unnecessarily. to obtain information such as fingerprints.
As for the ability to accurately identify the deceased, the company claimed that it works “effectively regardless of the injury to the face”, which it could not independently verify.