- Trump wants AI to be not “woke”; how will he enforce that? And he doesn’t like the word “artificial”;
- A reel by Yuval Noah Harari about a realistic threat of AI;
- Heather Cox Richardson on the various deflections Republicans are bringing up to stall release of the Epstein files.
So Trump issued executive orders today to fund AI and to make sure it’s not “woke.” Oh, and he doesn’t like the term “artificial” intelligence.
NY Times, 23 Jul 2025: Trump Plans to Give A.I. Developers a Free Hand [gift link]
Subtitled: With executive orders and an “A.I. Action Plan” to promote American dominance of the technology, President Trump declared that the United States needed to win the A.I. race.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he planned to speed the advance of artificial intelligence in the United States, opening the door for companies to develop the technology unfettered from oversight and safeguards, but added that A.I. needed to be free of “partisan bias.”
In a sweeping effort to put his stamp on the policies governing the fast-growing technology, Mr. Trump signed three executive orders and outlined an “A.I. Action Plan,” with measures to “remove red tape and onerous regulation” as well as to make it easier for companies to build infrastructure to power A.I.
One executive order barred the federal government from buying A.I. tools it considered ideologically biased. Another order would speed up the permitting process for major A.I. infrastructure projects, and a third focused on promoting the export of American A.I. products around the world.
A couple days ago we discussed Paul Krugman’s thoughts on whether AI is “communist,” meaning only that reality, and thus AI, has a liberal bias, and so its worldview seems, to MAGA, to be communist or fascist or Marxist or whatever other accusatory word they can think of at the moment.
So is there anything in today’s piece that suggests how Trump would mandate or regulate AI being “non-woke”? Here it touches on this:
But it also points to how the administration wants to shape the way A.I. tools present information. Conservatives have accused some tech companies of developing A.I. models with a baked-in liberal bias. Most A.I. models are already trained on copious amounts of data from across the web, which informs their responses, making any shift in focus difficult.
Which is to say, AI has absorbed data from across the web, and coordinated the data that seems internally consistent, and voila, these data do not include the various MAGA conspiracy theories or fantastical beliefs about the world, because they are not consistent with the vast majority of data about the real world.
Then there’s this:
The plan — and one of the executive orders — also calls for the government to give federal contracts to A.I. companies that “ensure that their systems are objective.” It said a government agency should revise guidelines for A.I.’s development to remove mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion; climate change; and misinformation.
“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,” Mr. Trump said in his speech. “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models.”
(So is it communist? Or is it Marxist? Does he or do they know the difference?)
But there’s no clue here about what standards Trump actually means.
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The JMG item about this quotes The Guardian:
During his remarks, Trump also proposed a more nominal change. “I can’t stand it,” he said, referring to the use of the word “artificial”.
“I don’t even like the name, you know? I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that. It’s not artificial. It’s genius,” he added.
Obviously, Trump has no idea what AI actually is, or does. But my thought is: suppose he decides to rename AI as “American Intelligence.” That would be the kind of thing he would do.
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Meanwhile, I’ve been seeing a bunch of short videos, or “reels,” on Facebook lately from Yuval Noah Harari, many on the subject of AI. And I’m currently working my way through his most recent book, NEXUS, which deals with how different societies and governments can be understood as different kinds of information flows. I think the end of the book will address AI, and how will change everything.
Harari *does* understand AI and provides this plausible, perhaps alarming, scenario. The video is here.
AI can already read and understand texts quicker than humans. It can remember texts much better than any human. It can certainly analyze and interpret texts faster than humans.
So what happens if the texts in question are holy texts? What influence will AI have on religion?
We already know that the one thing AI, or at least the Large Language Models, are good at, is absorbing a lot of texts, which they find by scouring the web, and condensing them and spitting them back out as summary answers to whatever questions you ask them. Harari’s point is that no one rabbi can “know” the Jewish religious texts (of which there are many) better than an AI can. The danger here is that people, rabbis or any other kind of expert, will be cut out of the system.
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Meanwhile, the Republicans, who are stalling release of the Epstein files (to doctor them, many think), are deflecting attention by bringing up, yet again, the “Obama/Russia Hoax” (e.g. here), as Heather Cox Richardson explained last night.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, July 23, 2025
This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that’s not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”
At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.
Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.
What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.
Sigh.
