According to a research by British newspaper The Guardian, Israel’s military surveillance agency is using seized communication records from Palestinians to create a powerful artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT.

Israel is seeking to advance its occupation in Palestinian territories with artificial intelligence.

A joint investigation by Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language Local Call revealed that Unit 8200 trained an artificial intelligence model to understand Arabic speakers using a large volume of phone calls and text messages obtained from extensive surveillance activities in occupied territories.

Sources familiar with the project told The Guardian that the unit began developing a sophisticated chatbot-like tool that can answer questions about individuals being monitored and provide insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data collected. Comparable in capabilities to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the surveillance agency accelerated the system’s development after the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023.

The model was still being trained in the second half of last year. However, it is unclear whether it has been deployed or not.

“WE FOCUS ONLY ON THOSE WHO HATE US”

A well-placed source with knowledge of the project told Guardian that the vast communication pool also includes conversations in Lebanese and Palestinian dialects.

In a presentation, Sayedoff relayed that the team building the LLM “focuses only on dialects that hate us.”

“INCOMPATIBLE WITH OCCUPIER AND HUMAN RIGHTS”

Human Rights Watch’s Campbell stated that using surveillance materials to train an artificial intelligence model is “incompatible with occupier and human rights” and that Israel, as an occupying power, is obliged to protect Palestinians’ privacy rights.

Campbell added, “We are talking about using highly personal data from individuals not suspected of any crime to train a tool that could later help generate suspicions.” Nadim Nashif, director of Palestinian digital rights and advocacy group 7amleh, noted that Palestinians have become subjects in Israel’s laboratory for developing these techniques and weaponizing artificial intelligence.

Nashif expressed that all of this is done “to perpetuate an apartheid and occupation regime that uses these technologies to control and rule over a population.”