The White House is close to announcing its next highly-anticipated AI executive order, reportedly targeting “woke” AI models.
A report from the Wall Street Journal says President Donald Trump‘s administration is expected to announce a series of executive orders next week. One of them will include mandates about government agencies using AI models that are politically neutral, unnamed sources told the Journal.
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Bias within AI models, especially related to politics and social issues, has become a critical point of contention for conservatives that deem certain models to be too left-leaning. This is an extension of Trump’s overall stance on media bias and “wokeism,” a term meant to describe awareness of social injustice that has been appropriated by the right as a pejorative term against liberals. The Trump Administration has made ending DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives a major part of its agenda, revoking federal DEI programs and calling these policies “wasteful” and “discriminatory.”
The efforts to favor “anti-woke” AI models in the executive order is reportedly led by AI Czar David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, senior White House policy adviser for AI. Sacks has previously criticized companies like OpenAI for making ChatGPT liberally biased. “One of the concerns about ChatGPT early on was that it was programmed to be woke, and that it wasn’t giving people truthful answers about a lot of things,” said Sacks in a 2023 episode of the All In podcast. “The censorship was being built into the answers.”
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Sacks and Elon Musk are longtime friends and former colleagues from their PayPal days. Musk’s xAI company makes the Grok chatbot, which is touted as an “anti-woke” alternative to other chatbots. As AI companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI vie for Trump’s favor and valuable government contracts, xAI might have an advantage with its political alignment. Although, Musk and Trump are fighting right now, which complicates things.
Of course, how political parties define bias is subjective. Grok recently went way right, far right, by praising Hitler and making anti-semitic claims. Meanwhile, research shows that LLMs — even the ones deemed too liberal by conservatives — are capable of implicit gender and racial bias, and skewed perceptions of press freedoms.
The Journal also reported that the Trump Administration is planning to issue an executive order promoting the export of AI chips made in the U.S., part of the government’s effort to secure AI dominance over China.
All eyes are on the White House for announcements expected next week.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.