Rachel Maddow warned viewers Monday night that AI has brought the internet to a “tipping point” regarding right-leaning bots and their directive to praise the Trump administration. The MSNBC anchor noted, “We’re running into some funny situations because of the combination of AI-driven slop online and the extreme and bizarre news environment that is the second term of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
The “Rachel Maddow Show” host went on to break down how the fractures forming within Trump’s MAGA fanbase because of his administration’s ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal have affected the internet’s pro-Trump bots.
“You no longer have to pay a troll farm of teenagers in Macedonia or Saint Petersburg, Russia, to pretend to be right-wing Americans saying political things online. Now, instead, they just train these automated bots to do it,” Maddow observed. “Here’s the problem: Artificial Intelligence is not actually intelligent.”
Case in point: the increasingly contradictory online social media posts coming from Trump’s AI fans, which have — among other things — praised and criticized attorney general Pam Bondi within the span of minutes.
“These bots are trained to mimic MAGA voices online. They are trained to sound like Trump supporters, based on the kind of stuff that Trump supporters say,” Maddow explained. “So when it comes to the Jeffrey Epstein story, the bots are malfunctioning!”
You can watch the full “Rachel Maddow” show segment yourself in the video below.
Maddow noted that she does not ultimately blame the pro-Trump bots in question for being confused about the Trump administration’s handling of its Epstein files.
“If you’re going to try to be pro-Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein issue, what are you going to say?” the MSNBC host asked. “I mean, what happened to the lawyer who got Epstein his bizarrely lenient plea deal when he was first arrested on sex trafficking charges in Florida?”
“Oh, Trump hired him to be his own lawyer,” Maddow said of attorney Alan Dershowitz. “What happened to the U.S. attorney who gave Jeffrey Epstein that bizarrely lenient plea deal? Oh, Trump put him in his cabinet in his first term. Well, who then prosecuted Epstein a second time when he was brought up on federal charges? Oh, that was the SDNY line prosecutor who Trump inexplicably fired last week.”
Taking all of that into account, Maddow remarked that there was only ever going to be one outcome to the Trump administration’s Epstein case. “If you’re supposed to be a pro-Trump bot commenting on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, what are you going to do? You’re going to melt down,” she concluded. “They don’t know what to say anymore.”
