Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Center Launches Joint Information Warfare Effort with New MISO Tool

Editor’s note: Following the trend in the military Services, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) has expanded its Cyber National Mission Initiative to include information operations and electronic warfare, dubbing the new pillar, Joint Information Warfare. The JAIC already has a new tool called “Entropy” to roll out across the Department of Defense that uses artificial intelligence to help Military Information Support Operations (MISO) personnel sort through large amounts of text and video to identify trends. An early version of the tool was developed for Special Operations Command Pacific and focuses on three languages: Tagalog, Mandarin and English. A future version of Entropy, still being considered, would “build upon the passive component by taking the topics identified, feeding them into a language model, and downselecting messages for the team to review and score. This would help train the algorithm to improve,” according to a report in C4ISRNet. The use of AI to passively cull through large amounts of video feeds from theater started in 2018 with the founding of Project Maven, which is now becoming an operational program. All across DOD, the JAIC is seeking opportunities to develop and transition AI applications that facilitate military missions and improve the autonomy and efficiency of back-end business functions. With so much data available in open source environments, it makes sense to use tools like Entropy, not to replace the analyst, but to let the analyst or operator focus on the most useful and reliable information in the shortest amount of time. Is AI perfect – far from it. AI is only as good as the data it learns from. But with such rich data sets already in the information environment, there is promise in training systems such as Entropy to assist information warriors in this evolving environment.

Read the full article, “Pentagon’s AI center to field new psychological operations tool,” here.