Navigating Ethics: The Trump Administration, AI, and the Declassification of JFK Files
The concerns stem from choosing which files need to be declassified by AI.
US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has stated that the Donald Trump administration used artificial intelligence (AI) to help decide which files should be declassified in the assassination of former president John F Kennedy.
AI-backed Decisions
Ms Gabbard confirmed the use of AI during her address at an Amazon Web Services conference, adding that her office had been increasingly adopting the new technology.
“We have released thousands, tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of JFK and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And we have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously, which is to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages,” said Ms Gabbard.
From her claims, using AI speeds up the otherwise lengthy process and allows workers to focus on other things they can do.
“How do we look at the available tools that exist — largely in the private sector — to make it so that our intelligence professionals, both collectors and analysts, are able to focus their time and energy on the things that only they can do,” she said.
Concerns and Standards
Not everyone was impressed with the US intel chief's use of AI, especially concerning classified documents.
"So...they let an AI review all that data and they believe that it didn't go anywhere else??" said one user while another added: "And to be clear, AI did a bad job. They released those records with unredacted private identifiable information like social security numbers and private addresses."
A third commented: "Hopefully an offline LLM. If it was done through a non-offline LLM then they already transmitted the classified documents into the public space."
Notably, throughout the presidential campaigning trail, Mr Trump promised the voters that he would release the JFK files once sworn in to power. In January, he signed an executive order directing the release of federal government documents related to the assassination.
However, multiple analyses of documents showed that many of them had already been released to the public in some form but were previously redacted. Over the years, several conspiracy theories have claimed that Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson, could have been behind the assassination.
