Editors at National Review Online assess President Donald Trump’s approach toward artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, during his appearance at the “Winning the AI Race” summit in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump launched the White House’s AI Action Plan. Per the executive orders that were signed during the event, the president’s project contains three major planks. First, it establishes a set of procurement rules that prohibit the federal government from purchasing any AI product that, in Trump’s words, “has been infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas.” Second, it seeks to “expedite construction of all major AI infrastructure projects,” by waiving or reversing Biden-era environmental obstacles and “easing Federal regulatory burdens.” Third, it encourages the export of American hardware and software, “to preserve and extend American leadership in AI and decrease international dependence on AI technologies developed by our adversaries.” All of these policies are within the federal government’s remit, and all three are welcome on the merits.
The White House acknowledged that “the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace,” but proposed that, “in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.” The success of this policy will be entirely contingent upon the execution, but there is nothing in the order that ought to raise alarm. As an example of pernicious wokeness “in the AI context,” the president cited Google Gemini’s much-mocked post-launch habit of changing “the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy.” Among the categories that it singled out for scrutiny are “the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.”
