President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order requiring artificial intelligence companies that do business with the federal government to strip AI models of "ideological agendas."
Speaking at an AI summit in Washington, Trump said: "The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models."
The order bans federal agencies from contracting with tech companies that operate AI chatbots displaying partisan bias, which the action defines as diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory, "transgenderism" — forces the order says pose "an existential threat to reliable AI."
"From now on, the U.S. government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness and strict impartiality," Trump said.
The White House is also planning to revise Biden-era federal guidelines for AI safety to remove references to diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change and misinformation, according to the Trump administration's AI action plan released on Wednesday.
These are the latest instances of the Trump administration turning the screws on DEI initiatives and railing against popular AI chatbots. Trump supporters have increasingly criticized the technology, saying safety guardrails end up censoring conservative views.
"The AI industry is deeply concerned about this situation," said Neil Sahota, a technologist who advises the United Nations on artificial intelligence issues. "They're already in a global arms race with AI, and now they're being asked to put some very nebulous measures in place to undo protections because they might be seen as woke," he said. "It's freaking tech companies out."
One possible way AI companies could respond, according to Sahota, is to unveil "anti-woke" versions of their chatbots with fewer safeguards in order to land the lucrative business of the federal government.
"If you're a tech company with a lot of government contracts, this order is a sticky wicket," Sahota said.
While some studies have shown that popular chatbots can at times deliver left-of-center responses to certain policy questions, experts say it can often come down to how a question is framed, or what part of the internet the system is summarizing.
AI scholars say there is no proof that any major chatbot has been intentionally designed to generate liberal answers and censor conservative views.
"Often what is happening with these criticisms is that a chatbot doesn't align with someone's respective viewpoint, so they want to place the blame on the model," said Chinasa Okolo, a fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Woke AI: From rallying cry to government policy
Turning "woke AI" into a rallying cry has parallels to a previous conservative battering ram against Silicon Valley: the belief that content guidelines on social media platforms were devised to muzzle right-wing perspectives.
Last year, the howls over chatbots being "woke" intensified when Google's Gemini image generator depicted Black and Asian men as being U.S. founding fathers and Vikings as being ethnically diverse. Google executives apologized, and the company explained Gemini had overcorrected for diversity, including "cases that should clearly not show a range."
Developing policies to counter such episodes has become a focus for White House AI czar David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, a senior policy advisor in the Trump administration.
It is a striking reversal from how the Biden administration approached the technology, when officials sought ways to enact barriers against AI perpetuating bias and potentially violating peoples' civil rights.
Now, new energy has been breathed into making AI a part of the larger culture wars.
Conservative activists seized on the Google Gemini snafu, but when Elon Musk's Grok chatbot flew off the rails earlier this month and launched into antisemitic tirades, few right-wing commentators responded.
Just days later, the maker of Grok, Musk's xAI, was awarded a Defense Department contract worth up to $200 million, along with Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.
"Musk's original vision for xAI was a sort of 'anti-woke AI,' but when you control poorly for data quality and disable safeguards, you get things like the recent Nazi episode," said Talia Ringer, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
xAI blamed outdated software code on the meltdown. In particular, instructions that told Grok to be "maximally based," a slang term for holding strong opinions even if they are troubling, which was reinforced by a similar instruction given to the chatbot: "You tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct." The company said the issue has been fixed.
Most popular chatbots have protections against things like slurs, harassment and hate speech, basic guardrails that may now be under new scrutiny by the Trump administration.
"Most of the examples I've seen conservatives cite of AI being too 'woke' are LLMs refusing to confirm conspiracy theories or racist claims," said Ringer, using the abbreviation for large language models, which underpin chatbot technology.
To Okolo at the Brookings Institution, the battle over whether chatbots perpetuate left- or right-leaning views is overshadowed by another fight over the acceptance of provable facts.
"Some people, unfortunately, believe that basic facts with scientific basis are left-leaning, or 'woke,' and this does skew their perceptions a bit," she said.
Doing the work of changing AI systems to respond to the White House executive order will be messy, said technologist Sahota, because where lines are drawn, and why, can initiate all sorts of political and cultural firestorms.
"What is even politically-driven? In this day and age, if someone says something about the importance of vaccination for measles, is that now a politically charged discussion?" he said. "But if there's potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in future federal contracts on the line, companies might have to do something, or they could be putting a serious amount of revenue in jeopardy."
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