The Download: selling battlefield drone data and AI reshaping language
This newsletter highlights the emerging industry of selling battlefield drone data from Ukraine to military contractors for AI model training. It also features a short story exploring the ethical implications of AI-driven language shifts and mentions OpenAI's new Astra model.
Why it matters
The intersection of active warfare and AI development raises critical ethical and regulatory questions about the commercialization of battlefield data.
Plus: OpenAI has launched Astra, its most capable model yet.
This is today's edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.
—Cory Alpert, a researcher at the University of Melbourne studying AI's impact on democracy, who previously served in the Biden White House.
Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate.
Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It’s a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce.
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