I think it’s probably safe to say that none of our 2024 bingo cards had President Trump going on Logan Paul’s podcast and raving about how good AI is at rewriting his speeches.
AI, of course, is continuing to roil pretty much every industry on the planet, in the course of which it’s threatening to rob countless professionals of work — while also straight-up stealing the intellectual property of a vast number of creators. The latter is being enabled by tech companies like Google and OpenAI, which are desperate to convince people that the more AI learns to copy humans, the more it’s learning to be human.
President Trump, however, doesn’t seem burdened at all by what I’ve previously described as the brazen intellectual property heist enabled by AI. He’s still at the ‘it’s scary, but let’s also see how I can take advantage of it’ phase.
After ranting for several minutes on Paul’s show about his actually very reasonable fear that a deepfaked head of state ordering a nuke strike could result in a real and devastating counter-attack, Trump then dropped a nugget about one of his speeches. “What it does is so crazy,” he says about AI. “Now, it can also really be used for good. I mean, things can happen. I had a speech rewritten by AI out there.”
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Trump didn’t mention which particular speech he was referring to, but he then turns to one of his usual demonstrations of how technology works — often, with a verbalized “bing, bing, bing,” or in this case a “click, click, click.” Fifteen seconds later, he continues, a member of his team shows him the reworked speech, “written so beautifully.”
“I said, ‘I’m gonna use this. I’ve never seen anything like it.’”
Snicker about that or roll your eyes if you want, but one thing I find interesting about Trump’s reaction to AI is actually how closely it mirrors that of people like Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
People like them profess a certain amount of fear when it comes to AI, but they’ve decided to overlook the downside risks of AI in order to capitalize on its rewards. Altman, for example, has voiced concerns about AGI possibly leading to the destruction of humanity one day — but that hasn’t stopped him or his minions from wanting to build the first AGI. “AI will most likely lead to the end of the world,” Altman once said, before adding (very un-ironically), “but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
Likewise, with Trump; AI might send us careening into a nuclear conflict, but it can also save me from having to pay a speechwriter. Oh well, we’re all gonna die someday, right?