The act of labeling data is itself inherently political. It requires interpreting the landscape to meet military and legal requirements. In practice, this means what was a girls school is transformed into an identity called ‘legitimate target.’ It’s been this way for decades, but
the use of AI in the targeting cycle has made it more apparent. As outside observers, it is basically impossible to know the ‘ground truth’ that’s been encoded into military datasets until something goes wrong. And yet we’re increasingly practicing IHL’s principle of distinction