“The Briefing” host Jen Psaki argued Tuesday night that President Trump may not even know what artificial intelligence even is, beyond the fact that the AI-generated content he posts online “makes him feel powerful.”
The president has made waves with his aggressively pro-AI comments of late. In recent days, Trump has pushed back against calls to slow down the tech’s development and alleged that data centers have made many dying American communities very wealthy. Furthermore, he wrote on Truth Social that the only “guardrails” AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
“Anyone know where one of those is?” Psaki asked Tuesday night in response. The MS NOW anchor noted that the public’s growing concerns about AI have managed to bring together even longtime political opponents like Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. Despite that, she sees little being done to regulate the industry.
“If Congress wanted to take even an itty bitty tiny step toward regulating AI anytime soon, the time would be now. But with Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, the White House, basically everything, I wouldn’t really hold your breath,” Psaki explained. “Yesterday, Trump called the concerns about AI a hoax.”
“This is clearly an industry with a growing amount of unwieldy, unchecked power,” she continued. “What does scare me about this moment is that the person at the wheel right now is Donald Trump. And frankly, it is deeply unclear, just to begin with, that he even really knows what AI is.”
Psaki continued insisting that Trump may not have much of a grasp on AI, let alone the dangers that the technology presents.
“It’s unclear if Trump knows much about it beyond the fact that he really likes posting content that is more likely than AI-generated, very clearly AI-generated,” the “Briefing” host said. “Boy, does that all that make him feel good about himself. It makes him feel powerful, what AI can do.”
“As industry leaders are warning us that this technology could get to a point where it stops listening to humans altogether, Trump is telling the public that, if that happens, we will simply turn it all off,” Psaki added. “Like it’s a toaster that you unplug, I guess.”
Indeed, the MS NOW anchor rolled a clip of Trump joking in an interview that there will be a “little gear” that humans will always have to turn off dangerous AI and robots.
“Does that sound like someone who knows how AI works to you?” Psaki asked after the clip. Later, she concluded, “It’s hard to imagine Trump knows what he is talking about on AI at all, but it is even harder to imagine that all of the money he can make from the AI industry isn’t clouding his judgment, isn’t it? So, with Trump in charge, Republicans in Congress following his lead on everything he’s saying about it all, what can we actually do here?”
