Trump EO Attempts to Axe Woke AI in Government
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday titled, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order states, “Americans will require reliable outputs from Al, but when ideological biases or social agendas are built into Al models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output.”
The new directive prohibits the federal government from purchasing any AI systems that default to anti-white or extreme ideologies. The EO singles out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as one of the most “pervasive and destructive of these ideologies.”
The order cites one major AI model that “changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy.”
Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races. In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not “misgender” another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse.
While the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace, in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.
