At President Donald Trump’s recent rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump pledged to nullify an executive order issued by President Joe Biden concerning the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Amid the buzz of his ongoing 2024 election campaign, Trump highly criticized the Biden administration, specifically Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. He claimed that Mayorkas has been leveraging AI as a means to suppress political conversations within the country.
Thus, the prospect of reversing the current administration’s course of action towards AI surfaced as a significant focus during the rally.
In his public address, Trump candidly expressed his disdain towards the recent attempt to delve thoroughly into the potential applications of AI.
He indicated his intent to abolish Biden’s AI-related executive order on his return to the presidency. “When I’m reelected, I will cancel Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order and ban the use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens on day one,” he vowed.
Across the national spectrum, Biden’s October executive order has stirred mixed responses. It laid out a blueprint encompassing aspects like job loss mitigation, algorithm safety evaluations, and tools for spotting AI-synthesized images. Yet, it did not appear to convince industry pundits, some of whom speculated it to be merely cosmetic and unlikely to significantly sway federal operations without legislative support. Some critics see it as federal interference with AI governance that transcends its jurisdiction.
AI’s potential for moderating and censoring content on social platforms is widely acknowledged. Being leveraged for private content moderation, it has raised valid concerns about censorship, which Trump cites as a pillar of his argument.
