President had brushed away suggestions to slow down AI technology, even as his own party counseled caution
Donald Trump on Saturday said he would appoint an artificial intelligence czar and create an “AI Force” to help monitor the technology, though he gave almost no details about either plan.
As global fears over AI have grown, especially in the past week in the face of multiple industry figures sounding the alarm about its dangers, the president has been critical of calls to slow down development of the fast-moving industry.
The creation of a czar and a new AI body in the US appears a response to critics of his stance, which in part is born out of a fear that China will best the US in AI development if the industry in America does not continue its rapid growth. However, even many Republicans have been calling for caution and an AI slowdown in the face of its potential threat to public safety.
“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term. To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar’ – Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” Trump said in a social media post.
But in the post, Trump also repeated his stance that the rapidly emerging technology – which some industry experts fear poses a threat to human existence – is being unfairly maligned.
Trump called the fears surrounding AI a “hoax”.
“Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country,” he fulminated, including in a list of grievances Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ukraine, global warming, two impeachments, men in women’s sports and “transgender for everyone”.
The latest, he wrote, is “the decimation, or destruction, of AI, commonly known as Artificial Intelligence”, and said that his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry”.
The president said that any “bad actors” in AI industry could be addressed by criminal and civil systems of justice. “AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP,” Trump predicted, concluding that the US is “leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way”.
The post came after an earlier missive in which he questioned the term “artificial intelligence” – coined by American computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955 and defined as the capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior – to describe the accelerating data-processing revolution now under way.
Trump said that “a far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI)”.
Trump’s proposal comes ahead of his meeting with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, next Thursday as the UN general assembly takes place in New York. The US and China are competing for leadership in the AI sector.
The announcement of a planned AI czar also came a day after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced plans for a panel to develop safety regulations for state’s AI companies that would include the development of a possible “kill switch” for AI programs that become misaligned, or go rogue, from human programmers.
As recently as Monday, Trump argued on social media that his administration had done enough to prevent risks of event. He described calls to slow AI development as part of a “SICK conspiracy” to benefit China.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is an STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he wrote.
Ahead of the midterm elections, politicians from both political parties are scrambling to find a path to support tech innovation while responding to rising public and industry fears of technological change.
The activity kicked off earlier this month when a young researcher who had been employed at the AI company Anthropic said AI companies are “gambling with our lives” and even “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
AI executives, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei have since called for a slowdown in the technology’s growth in the wake of an incident in which a group of AI agents created by OpenAI acted as a “ fanatically devoted collective conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack”.
Trump’s call for an AI czar comes after many Republicans have rejected his hands-off approach.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has advocated for AI controls, and that state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, has called for laws allowing the state to criminally charge companies for illegal acts carried out with the use of their technologies. Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has called on Congress to pass AI safety laws and block the sale of high-end technology to China.