Is it a coincidence that the United States Air Force has allowed an AI to take control of one of its training jets right about the same time that ChatGPT has hit the mainstream? Is it concerning that the chatbot has started acting a little… spotty right about now? In order, the answers are: yes and (probably) no.

Still, we’re pretty sure James Cameron made a documentary about this scenario. A training aircraft, the Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A, has hosted an AI for the first time. Its flight time? Seventeen hours, which is seventeen more hours than most of us have in a fighter jet.

Quite a VISTA for the Air Force

VISTA stands for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft. It’s a modified F-16D Block 30 Peace Marble Il capable of mimicking other aircraft, which is why it’s used for training. And the Air Force has used it to train an AI system in a few different skills.

These include advanced manoeuvres and beyond-visual-range navigation — in other words, the fighter jet left the sight of the folks on the ground. It was able to do this using a few upgrades — an improved VISTA Simulation System (VSS), as well as a Model Following Algorithm (MFA), and a System for Autonomous Control of the Simulation (SACS). The latter two, MFA and SACS, were made by Lockheed Martin.

“VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs,” said Dr. M. Christopher Cotting, U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School director of research. “This approach, combined with focused testing on new vehicle systems as they are produced, will rapidly mature autonomy for uncrewed platforms and allow us to deliver tactically relevant capability to our warfighter.”

Translation? Expect to see more AI-piloted jets in the very near future, with a mind towards phasing out human pilots in some circumstances.

The move isn’t an unexpected one. DARPA has been threatening to put an AI in the pilot’s seat for a couple of years now. It just so happens that, in December 2022, they actually went and did it.