Lavender Has Red Hands

A poem

Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

Below is a poem by Rosie Adams, a musician, artist, and poet based in New Orleans, Louisiana. This is the first guest content published on Handful of Earth. I am pleased to say that it is by an old and dear friend.

Rosie wrote the following remarks to read alongside her poem. If you are already familiar with Israel’s Lavender artificial intelligence program and would like to experience the poem first without further context, please feel free to skip to “Lavender Has Red Hands” below and read her remarks afterwards. -Vincent

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Lavender is an AI program developed by Israeli intelligence to generate targets for kill lists. The program is allegedly used to discern how closely linked a target is to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It logs GPS data and social media activity, tracks how many times an individual has switched phones and employs facial recognition technology in order to algorithmically generate targets.

According to an April 3, 2024 investigative report by +972 Magazine (featured previously here on Handful of Earth), Lavender has generated 37,000 targets. I recently held signs on the street in Savannah, Georgia that read “Lavender is not a garden herb! Say no to AI generated kill lists” and “Abolish AI and warplane spies.” This was an attempt to provoke uncensored, in-person dialogue in a public space.

The reasons for doing this in the physical public sphere with handmade signs should be self-evident considering the information I was attempting to get across. Sadly, it is often taken for granted that the online world and in-person space are equivalent, or that their value difference is negligible. Many of us don’t see the relationship between our reliance on the internet and the threat of an AI kill list generator. We do not feel that we are complicit. This produces unrecognized vulnerabilities.

I want us to reflect on our own struggle to be autonomous beings while the state and private sector use the internet to entice, manipulate and surveil us. I want us to reckon with how our own reliance on the internet and smartphones creates the data needed to feed AI development and how AI is inevitably used for war. I want the conversation on AI ethics to directly confront the horrors being inflicted upon Palestinians.

Many claim that technology is simply “in the wrong hands.” I want people to recognize there are no “right hands” for such a dangerous weapon. AI is an irreconcilable enemy of humanity. Lavender is proving this.

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Lavender Has Red Hands

We caught you! Show us your hands!

But they were invisible

Now I have to check to see how many fingers I have

The blood was everywhere

But you were nowhere

The papers never said your 

Name, in fact I haven’t seen a paper at all in quite some time.

You were an oracle made of stars, you placed a black hat over the light

The eclipse masked your departure.

You were an omen

An ever-expanding electric labyrinth

Pouring static out of your astrological veins.

Blood spatters on the garden. Painting the lavender crimson.

Blood on the earth, we become all the more indistinguishable

While you were not to be located 

Dendrites pulsed glaciers and constellations, generating vitric staircases

Ever ascending into eternity’s open mouth

You never were

And will leave no trace behind.

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