Training artificial intelligence models does not typically involve coming face-to-face with an armed soldier who is pointing a gun at you and shouting at your driver to get out of the car. But the system that F. LeRon Shults and Justin Lane, cofounders of CulturePulse, are developing for the United Nations is not a typical AI model.
“I got pulled over by the [Israeli] military, by a guy holding [a military rifle] because we had a Palestinian taxi driver who drove past a line he wasn’t supposed to,” Shults tells WIRED. “So that was an adventure.”
Shults and Lane were in the West Bank in September, just weeks before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, sparking what has become one of the worst periods of violence in the region in at least 50 years.
Shults and Lane—both Americans who are now based in Europe—were on the ground as part of a contract they signed with the UN in August to develop a first-of-its-kind AI model that they hope will help analyze solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Shults and Lane are aware that claiming that AI could “solve the crisis” between Israelis and Palestinians is likely to result in a lot of eye-rolling if not outright hostility, especially given the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza daily. So they are quick to dispel that this is what they are trying to do.
“Quite frankly, if I were to phrase it that way, I’d roll my eyes too,” Shults says. “The key is that the model is not designed to resolve the situation; it’s to understand, analyze, and get insights into implementing policies and communication strategies.”
The conflict in the region is centuries old and deeply complex, and it’s made even more complicated by the current crisis. Countless efforts at finding a political solution have failed, and any eventual end to the crisis will need support not just from the two sides involved, but likely the wider international community. All of this makes it impossible for an AI system to simply spit out a fully formed solution. Instead, CulturePulse aims to pinpoint the underlying causes of the conflict.
“We know that you can’t solve a problem this complex with a single AI system. That’s not ever going to be feasible in my opinion,” Lane tells WIRED. “What is feasible is using an intelligent AI system—using a digital twin of a conflict—to explore the potential solutions that are there.”
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