AI Doesn’t Spout MAGA Propaganda. No Wonder Donald Trump Hates It.
First, the Trump administration grossly misunderstands Large Language Models. LLMs don’t use the truth-finding tools of liberal society: scientific, academic, legal, or journalistic inquiry. But nor do they, as MAGA would have it, burp out Trump’s whoppers as if they were the Word of God. Instead, LLMs spot patterns in massive datasets. And massive is important. LLMs can’t constrain their datasets to Trump’s edicts—or they’ll lose utility entirely. If Trump wants a piece of the AI pie, he is going to have to confront something that terrifies him. Reality.
Second, Trump mistakenly believes that social media is still the internet’s killer app. Indeed, Twitter and then Truth Social have been Trump’s playgrounds because they’re filled with lies. It’s the famous social-media business model. To get people to spend maximum time on apps like Facebook and Instagram, algorithms feed them not workaday facts but cartoonish fictions that spike fear and fury. But LLMs that train AIs are not designed to get people to stick to them; they’re effective to the degree that they meet queries with clarity and checkable facts.
People simly don’t come to AI for fear and fury. Of the 99 percent of Americans who now use AI at least once a week, nearly everyone turns to it for cool-headed stuff like coding, basic information, navigation, and weather. Unless they’re trying to trip up AI to score political points, Americans are not barraging AI with bad-faith third-rail queries.
