‘Seeing’ war through AI’s lenses: military AI, technological mediation, and the representation of war

How does military artificial intelligence (AI) shape how war is known, understood, and acted upon? This article conceptualizes military AI as an epistemic machine – a system that mediates how the battlespace becomes intelligible. Drawing on the theory of technological mediation and critical AI scholarship, it examines how different AI systems mediate warfare through distinct epistemic lenses and military applications. Rather than treating AI as a singular technology, the article differentiates between classification, prediction, and anomaly detection systems, showing how each foregrounds particular features of war while obscuring others. Across these configurations, AI narrows military perception by privileging historical patterns over novelty, quantifiable signals over ambiguity, and statistically normalized representations over singularity. Through a series of empirical vignettes, the article argues that military AI does not merely support decision-making but reconfigures the very conditions of human judgement and action, resulting in a ‘technification’ of perception and understanding.