Trump’s ‘anti-woke’ AI policy
When the president announced his AI Action Plan on Wednesday, he also signed three executive orders — one of them titled “Preventing woke AI in the federal government.”
“DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI,” the order says.
So, the order says: “LLMs [large language models, trained on vast amounts of data] shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.”
And: “LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.”
Reactions collected by The New York Times:
“What it seems like they’re doing is saying, ‘If you’re producing outputs we don’t like, that we call biased, we’re not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,’” says Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.”
Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, says the executive order sets “a really vague standard that’s going to be impossible for providers to meet.”
Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, says, “controlling the many subtle answers that an AI will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.”
In other words, it’s not as straightforward as telling an AI chatbot to be less woke, the Times says. And while there are relatively simple tweaks developers could make to their chatbots, there’s no guarantee that those changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want.
But asking whether the Trump administration’s new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether AI developers can build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point, says Times reporter Kevin Roose.
“These campaigns are designed to intimidate,” Roose says. “And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, AI companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight.”
“Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,” says Lakier. “I’m surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.”
Technology reporter Casey Newton says in the Times’ Hard Fork podcast: “The end state of this, if taken to its logical conclusion, is that you ask ChatGPT who won the 2020 election, and it tells you Donald Trump, because that’s what Donald Trump says. And if he decides that it’s woke to say that Biden won in 2020 and you can’t get a federal contract otherwise, man, we are going to be in deep water.”