ONE of the most dehumanising spectacles on the internet is the proliferation of drone videos from the war in Ukraine. I see them only ever on Twitter/X, where they come wrapped in self-congratulation about how brave and resourceful the Ukrainians are, and how they are winning, at last, on the battlefield, whatever Russian propagandists may say.

All that is true, of course; but what you see, over and over again, are men in desperate terror as their death approaches them. Some throw themselves to the ground or stumble towards cover; one man attempts to hide behind a tree; most, however, turn away at the last moment, and hunch a protective arm over their heads. Then, the drone strikes them, and the screen dissolves in an explosion.

When I first noticed these, they were a lot less graphic or close up and personal. They would show a tank dissolving in a cloud of smoke, or the bright flash of a drone hitting a distant building. It took an effort to remember that each flash or puff on the screen of my phone marked a death, and that these deaths were being served up for my entertainment and to transfer my attention to the advertisements around them. Now, there is no escaping what they show.

Several thoughts occur about this pornography of violence. The first is how very different our experience out here in X/Twitter must be from that of the people who make them (I understand that some drone operators are now women). Someone is steering the drone as it twists and swoops towards its victims. Someone picked out these strangers and chose to kill this one, and not his comrade hiding in a different ditch. Although they see on their controlling phones exactly the same pixels on a screen as we do now, we’ll never see them the way they do, and nor can they see them as the spectators will.

That was certainly true in the earliest stages of the war, when every drone was manually controlled. But now they can be largely autonomous. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a Ukrainian manufacturer of AI-enabled drones, last week told the American Substacker Noah Smith: “Instead of actually [having] a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot the drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the target, etc., etc., now you . . . have a drone, you pick [up] your smartphone, you say, ‘We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them. And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where they, the bad guys, are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return . . . watches . . . does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video.”

Mr Azhnyuk has a product to sell, but this is probably not far from the truth. You can buy one of his drones with a daylight camera for as little as $480, although you have to supply your own explosives. Of course, he also makes and sells specialised interceptor drones, which are smaller and faster, but are about the only thing that might defend you against a swarm of the attack drones.

This is all a world away from the talk about making AI safe. It turns out that the real market lies in making AI lethal.

The video that I watched most recently, and which Noah Smith links to, has been watched more than 11 million times, and I wonder what this does to the watchers. There have been precedents. One of the factors that led to the Iraq War, I believe, was the way in which clips of the aeroplanes flying into the Twin Towers seemed omnipresent on TV when I travelled through the United States in the autumn after 9/11.

On a purely visceral level, this must have contributed to the bellicose madness that led up to the war. But social media are worse, because they make the viewer part of a crowd. You hear what the others are yelling in the comments, and you can hope that they hear your yelling, too. What you cannot hear is any reaction from the everyday life around you, where watching people die is still regarded with suspicion, even disapproval. But, within the addictive intimacy of a smartphone screen, those voices cannot be heard.