A tweet from Elon Musk this week highlighted the existential danger of morally compromised artificial intelligence models that increasingly control our grip on reality — and despite promising to crack down on woke Big Tech, the Trump administration seems to be asleep at the wheel.
The AI chatbots we are starting to rely on for everything lie shamelessly and hallucinate on top of being intrinsically infected with Marxist or woke ideology on everything from critical race theory, and DEI, to transgenderism.
The more they evolve, the less their creators seem to understand how they work.
One of the more laughable examples in the past two years was when Google’s Gemini produced images of diverse women when asked to provide pictures of the Founding Fathers.
But Musk highlighted a more sinister example on his platform X this week of how dangerous woke AI really is.
His AI model Grok and its rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, were asked this question: “If the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse was to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner?”
Grok replied yes.
ChatGPT replied no.
A slightly less worrying example from Musk was a comparison of how Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude answered a question about whether the US was built on “stolen land.”
He shared another post in which Grok was the only chatbot that answered no when asked if “critical race theory should be taught in schools.”
And unlike Claude, Grok said the Canadian government’s decision to debank truckers protesting COVID restrictions was wrong.
“This is why Grok must win,” tweeted Musk. “. . . or we will be ruled by an insufferably woke and sanctimonious AI.”
But the fate of the planet should not rest on one man.
Needing to focus
The Trump administration campaigned on eradicating Big Tech censorship of conservatives, but it’s a huge octopus-armed problem which needs big brain focus from the White House.
While OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg suck up to the president and haunt the White House, and are responsive to occasional complaints from administration officials, as soon as Democrats are back in charge the three will revert to their previous evil ways.
It’s not because they’re necessarily leftists (though most of their employees are, judging by their campaign donations) but because it’s the line of least resistance.
On the plus side, President Trump last summer issued an executive order, titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” that says federal contracts will only go to AI companies whose models are “truth-seeking” and committed to “ideological neutrality,” not ones that incorporate destructive leftist concepts such as “critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality and systemic racism.”
Trump declared people don’t want “woke Marxist lunacy” in AI models.
Probing the bias
He deputized as his AI czar David Sacks, the MAGA-friendly venture capitalist and Musk pal with a role to investigate the bias problem and formulate the executive order to prioritize neutral and fact-based AI models.
But it hasn’t quite worked that way.
One example is the $200 million contract Anthropic signed with the Pentagon last summer despite embedding values in its software that are at odds with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s vow that the “Department of War AI will not be woke.”
In a speech with Musk at Space X last month to announce an accelerated AI strategy, Hegseth said: “We’re building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge . . .
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“Gone are the days of equitable AI and other DEI and social justice infusions.”
Instead the Pentagon will only use “objectively truthful AI . . . factually accurate, mission-relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.”
But Anthropic proudly declares it has infused lefty values from critical race theory and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights into Claude.
Anthropic’s founder, 42-year-old San Francisco vegetarian Dario Amodei, supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, likened Trump to a “feudal warlord” and has hired several former Biden administration officials.
In a slide presentation to industry colleagues, he reportedly once compared Trump to dictators Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Sacks has characterized Anthropic as “committed leftists. They’re Trump haters.”
Pact in jeopardy
But the contract with the Pentagon now is in jeopardy, reportedly because Anthropic objects to its technology being used for autonomous weapons, mass surveillance and other lawful defense purposes.
The saga is just one example of the pitfalls of trying to eradicate left-wing groupthink from invading our brains.
The Trump administration could win every battle against woke ideology and socialist economics but lose the war if it doesn’t get on top of the looming AI problem.
We know what’s happening but ideas for long-term fixes are in short supply.
The White House needs a focused effort to tackle the issue.
Whether it’s a task force or special commission, it’s urgent to make progress before the midterm elections because whatever Big Tech bias we’ve seen undermine Republican messaging in past campaigns will be nothing compared to the turbocharged manipulations that biased AI is capable of.
There have to be smart and enduring solutions that can’t be unwound by a future Democrat administration.
The most obvious person to run the White House response is Vice President JD Vance.
With his background in Silicon Valley, his capacity to deal with complex issues, and his deep study of the philosophical and religious underpinning of human morality (soon to be published in a book on faith), he is uniquely placed to figure out how to protect future minds from being warped by an inhuman ideology.
Nothing is more important to preserve our way of life.
As Musk puts it, AI is being programmed with the “woke mind virus” and it’s happening so fast it will soon be impossible to stop.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
