the rise of AI war dashboards

The AI dashboard shows frigates gathered around Cyprus and military planes flying towards the Gulf, where a breaking news pin alerts users to unconfirmed reports of a drone strike on Dubai.

At that precise moment on Friday, more than 3,200 people had their eyes glued to “Monitor the Situation”, which tracks everything from world leaders’ locations to internet outages.

It’s one of several free sites using artificial intelligence to crunch data into interactive world maps that are info-rich but not always reliable.

Interest has surged in these tools since conflict erupted in the Middle East, along with memes gently mocking the kind of people who seek a movie-like control centre experience.

“I think it’s human psychology — they feel like they have God’s view or something,” said Elie Habib, creator of the AI dashboard “World Monitor”.

Habib, CEO of Middle Eastern music streaming platform Anghami, told AFP “World Monitor” has had 4.4 million visits since he built it in January.

“I just want to understand what’s happening in the world,” said the 53-year-old based in Dubai, who originally envisaged his tool as a “Bloomberg Terminal for geopolitics”.

Despite the war driving a spike in interest, Habib said he has not put adverts on the site because he doesn’t want to profit from the conflict.

“World Monitor” displays more than 450 data sources on a crowded, customisable screen that includes live webcams from strategic global locations and AI-selected headlines from real news outlets.

Among a constellation of options on their map, users can see where protests, GPS jamming and earthquakes are taking place in real time.

Habib said he was “trying to move to the next step, which is extracting the signals from the noise. Otherwise, for me, it’s just too much noise.”

‘Not mere eye-candy’

Habib, a trained engineer based in Dubai, used AI to “vibe-code” his website over one weekend — a task he says would have taken at least a year if he had written the computer script by hand.

The inner workings of “World Monitor” are open source, so other programmers have made tweaks and suggestions that Habib has since built in.

Sites like “World Monitor” and “Monitor the Situation”, co-created by a staff member of US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have many flashy functions but experts said users should not treat all their insights as credible.

“They are not mere eye-candy… but they are not truth engines either,” Wei Sun, principal analyst for AI at Counterpoint Research, told AFP.

“The hallucination risk is real” when an AI model is tasked with determining the significance of information, or causal links, she said.

Despite the risk of false data points, these AI dashboards “satisfy a very modern psychological need”, Sun said.

“In a crisis, people want speed, synthesis, and a feeling of control when headlines are fragmented and overwhelming.”

Some of the sites have chatrooms for users to interact, noted Sun Sun Lim, a professor of communication and technology at Singapore Management University.

That is “especially engaging during unfolding events”, she said.

“Interest in global events has also been fuelled by the rise of prediction markets where people have been placing bets on events” from national elections to whether Iran’s supreme leader would be ousted, Lim said. Live feeds of these bets are sometimes featured on the AI dashboards.

So should news wires like AFP or Reuters be concerned about people turning to such sites for their updates on the global situation?

“They should worry somewhat, but not existentially,” said Counterpoint’s Sun.

“In my view, the real disruption doesn’t come from AI dashboards replacing these news wires, but how it pushes them upmarket, towards being the most trusted validators and explainers.”