ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Digital Impacts
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fhumd.2025.1540450
This article is part of the Research TopicHuman-Artificial Interaction in the Age of Generative AIsView all 3 articles
The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Military Intelligence: An Experimental Investigation of Added Value in the Analysis Process
Provisionally accepted
- University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany
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This study explores the potential of AI to support the work of military intelligence analysts.In the study, 30 participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition (in which they could use a proprietary AI tool) and a control group (no access to the AI tool). In both conditions, participants had access to the same dataset of 50 media articles and were asked to provide a comprehensive picture in response to a series of realistic military intelligence tasks. The proprietary AI tool included text search, automatic text summarization, and named entity recognition (NER) capabilities. It was shown that under time pressure, the use of the AI features resulted in better assessments than the control group. It was also shown that the probability estimates of the experimental group were closer to those of the experts. Despite these demonstrably better analysis results and probability estimates in the experimental group, no higher confidence in the sources used for the analysis task was found. Finally, the paper identifies the limitations of using AI in military intelligence, particularly in the context of analyzing ambiguous and contradictory information.
Keywords: military intelligence, artificial intelligence, Open source intelligence, Analysis process, experiment
Received: 05 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nitzl, Cyran, Krstanovic and Borghoff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Uwe M. Borghoff, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Neubiberg, Germany
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