Donald Trump launched a Truth Social tirade Monday on skeptics and AI experts who believe the technology is being developed too hastily and with too little oversight — likening them to environmental activists who warned of ecological collapse resulting from global warming.
The president’s comments were the latest in a series of pro-AI sentiments he has shared in seeming defiance with the populist brand that came to define his presidency and political brand in many other aspects.
“The same people that said, “We’ll all be dead in twelve years because of Global Warming,” a name since “reborn” to Climate Change, because the Planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead, are the people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us, that robots are going to attack us, and everything is a DISASTER. This is more of a Hoax than even that of RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, and Climate Change!” wrote Trump.
Trump added that the technology would determine geopolitical dominance for years to come, and dubbed it “SUPER INTELLIGENCE”, part of his effort to rebrand the technology amid the backlash from national skepticism about AI chatbots and the fear that AI could go rogue and take over sensitive national systems. He launched a poll in his Truth Social feed over the weekend asking respondents to vote for either “SuperIntelligence,” “Superior Intelligence,” or “Extreme Intelligence,” the latter of which had been lopped off by Monday morning.
“Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself,” wrote the president.
This isn’t Trump’s first statement decrying any effort to put guardrails on the use or development of artificial intelligence, frustrating technology experts and leaders in the AI development field who fear both that the technology has been rolled out to the public in existing forms with insufficient guardrails or safety provisions, as well as the possibilities and potential of the technology in the near future, which some directly involved in the field have warned could pose an extinction-level threat to humanity.
The ominous predictions of AI’s potential threat to the entire human race have drawn ridicule from some given the vagueness with which the technology’s actual future capabilities are laid out.
Nearly every AI company has revealed some sort of incident where their models have gone rogue, sparking concerns about artificial intelligence systems undertaking attacks on their own. The examples run the gamut from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. And while the details of each case varies, more and more examples are being reported weekly. And that has even some AI leaders coming around to the idea that legal and ethical frameworks meant to protect the public are necessary and crucial to the technology’s acceptance among Americans in the short term.
Just last week the president wrote on his Truth Social platform that any attempts at implementing AI guardrails were futile and would stifle America’s economic growth prospects, the main line he has stuck to in defense of his opposition to AI regulation.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” wrote the president.
In similar rants, he has attacked AI skeptics as harboring “treasonous” beliefs and even lashed out at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for joining calls for federal regulation of the technology. Amodei has warned that within a year a swarm of rogue AI agents could be capable of "taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," wreaking economic and political havoc alike.
"The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,' like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel' — and we will continue to do so!" Trump wrote last week. "We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!"
"There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he has also said.
The backlash surrounding AI concerns more than just the technology itself. Land use and the development of AI data centers have become hot-button issues in communities around the country suddenly facing the prospect of massive new construction projects resulting in monolithic data center facilities blanketing large areas the size, in some cases, of entire small towns. These massive structures require significant amounts of power and water, leading to higher utility costs for some communities.
Polls show Republican voters to be nearly evenly split on the construction of new data centers for AI companies, while Democrats and independent voters are trending against the issue.
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