Trump targets ‘woke' AI in diversity crackdown
The White House is preparing an executive order as soon as next week that would ban tech companies from government contracts if their AI is not 'politically neutral'.
The decree, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes after a series of blunders by technology giants as they have sought to fine-tune their AI tools to avoid prejudice and offence.
Last year, Google's Gemini chatbot prompted outcry after it generated pictures of racially diverse Nazis and other historically inaccurate images, such as black US founding fathers.
Google was forced to pause the launch of its image-generating app to contain the problem. A chatbot from Facebook owner Meta generated similar historical 'woke' images.
The errors came about as part of efforts by the companies to instil diversity into their tools. AI safety experts have long warned AI products risk amplifying the biases of their creators.
These problems have caught the attention of David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, Mr Trump's AI advisers, the Wall Street Journal said.
Fight against liberal bias
Republican politicians have for years railed against Silicon Valley's alleged liberal bias and accused companies of unfairly penalising conservatives with censorship and one-sided fact-checking. AI chatbots represent a fresh target for concern.
Last year, Elon Musk, whose xAI has developed the aggressively 'anti-woke' Grok chatbot, said: 'A lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they take on the philosophy of people around them.
'So you have a woke, nihilistic – in my opinion – philosophy that is being built into these AIs.'
Mr Musk has even criticised his own Grok chatbot for being too liberally biased. Last month, he responded to a user on X who had claimed Grok was 'manipulated by Leftist indoctrination', pledging to fix the bot.
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