MelanAI is coming for your kids
“The robots are here,” proclaimed Melania Trump during an AI event at the White House on Thursday. It can be hard to parse the first lady’s poker face and expressionless voice, but this certainly wasn’t a statement of regret. Rather Trump, reading from a script encased in a very analogue binder, was taking it upon herself to help America’s children navigate AI, which she touted as the “greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America”.
“As leaders and parents, we must manage AI’s growth responsibly,” she said in her speech. “During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children.”
Does that mean foisting them off to a nanny or, as Donald Trump once did with Donald Trump Jr, abandoning them at the airport because they’re five minutes late? No, it means “empowering, but with watchful guidance”, apparently.
Melania Trump doesn’t grace the White House with her presence particularly often. The first lady has made clear that is not beholden to things like “duty” or “tradition” like her predecessors. She does what she wants, when she wants. And Thursday’s roundtable on AI is the latest indication that she wants to position herself as a leading figure in the future of technology. Like the rest of her family, the first lady has enthusiastically embraced NFTs and cryptocurrency – and their amazing ability to rapidly generate the Trumps immense amount of wealth. She’s also boasted about using an AI version of her voice to narrate the audiobook version of Melania. And last month she launched an AI contest for kids in grades K-12.
The first lady isn’t just positioning herself as a leading voice in technology, she’s trying to brand herself as the face of responsible innovation. While announcing her AI contest for kids, for example, she boasted that she’d “championed online safety through the Take It Down Act” (TDA). It’s true that Melania advocated for the TDA, which passed congress with bipartisan support earlier this year and criminalizes the nonconsensual distribution of intimate imagery (NDIII, once known as “revenge porn”.) Nevertheless, the legislation is rather more complicated than she’d have it seem.
Image-base sexual abuse (both authentic imagery and AI-generated content) is a serious problem that scholars and activists have been trying to address via legislation for a long time. While it’s commendable that Trump wanted to get involved with the TDA, some people believe she swooped in at the last minute and put her name to a dangerously bastardized version of a model statue that experts developed. Numerous civil rights activists have warned that the TDA has been broadened so much that it will be weaponized against free speech.
“I am gratified that the [TDA] incorporates much of the language of the model federal statute against NDII I first drafted in 2013,” wrote Dr Mary Anne Franks, President of Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, in a statement earlier this year. “But the Take It Down Act also includes a poison pill: an extremely broad takedown provision that will likely end up hurting victims more than it help.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has similarly warned that the TDA is so broad that it gives the “powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don’t like”. Indeed, the president has said as much himself. “I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody,” he told a joint session of Congress.
All of which to say: Melania Trump may not be the best person to help manage AI’s growth responsibly and shield children from potential harm from the technology. But if she is keen on doing this work then I suggest she stop convening taskforces on how to integrate AI into childhood education, and simply ask her husband to stop gutting public education instead. The Trump administration is, for example, attempting to defund Head Start, a federally-funded early childhood program for low-income families and cancelled a grant program that has historically funded educational children’s programs like Sesame Street. The Trump administration is also trying to curtail education about slavery and Republicans are waging war on Wikipedia to try and remove criticism of Israel. More broadly book bans and censorship are flourishing under Trump.
Melania Trump is right that the robots are here, and they’re here to stay. But I’m not convinced that the Trump administration is going to responsibly integrate AI into our schools in a way which increases equity and the sum of human knowledge. Rather I think it’s more likely that all these AI taskforces will succeed in doing is diverting large sums of taxpayer money towards the tech CEOs who have been busy kowtowing to Trump.
AI “will make a few people much richer and most people poorer”, Christopher Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, told the FT on Friday. Which, I suspect, is precisely why Melania Trump and the coterie of billionaires and tech executives gathered around her at the White House, are so excited about it.
Accused rapist Conor McGregor wants to be the next president of Ireland
McGregor recently lost an appeal over a civil court ruling last year awarding damages to a woman who accused him of rape. He’s also had numerous other brushes with the law. Still that sort of thing doesn’t preclude someone from high office anymore does it? McGregor wants to be president of Ireland and Elon Musk is enthusiastically supporting him in that bid.
A venture capitalist went to extreme lengths to punish her surrogate
“Compared to natural conception, carrying a genetically unrelated fetus more than triples the risk of severe, potentially deadly conditions, a statistic surrogates are rarely given,” writes Emi Nietfeld for Wired in a harrowing feature about a venture capitalist, Cindy Bi, who viciously hounded her surrogate when the baby died in-utero. Bi then had a healthy baby via another surrogate – who had an emergency hysterectomy in the process. It feels like for-profit surrogacy has been normalized by celebrities; this piece is an essential reminder of the ethical issues involved with the womb-for-hire industry.
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Epstein victims say they will compile their own ‘client list’
“We know the names,” one survivor said during a press conference on Wednesday. “Now, together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world.”
RFK Jr hints access to abortion pill could be cut back
There is an enormous amount of evidence that shows mifepristone and misoprostol, commonly known as the abortion pills, are safe and effective. The health secretary, however, is claiming otherwise and suggested that access may be curtailed. Meanwhile, Texas just passed a bill banning abortion pills from being mailed to the state.
Laura Loomer thinks Palestinian kids aren’t innocent
The far-right Trump confidante and “proud Islamophobe” recently used her considerable influence to get the Trump administration to block medical visas for sick kids from Gaza. Now she’s justifying this by calling Palestinian kids terrorists. “You think these kids are so innocent?” Loomer said on her podcast. “[Y]ou think little kids are not capable of evil?” I think the real terrorists here may be the people who have created the world’s largest cohort of child amputees and are systematically starving babies to death.
Google has a $45m contract to spread Israeli propaganda
Loomer is not the only one spreading dehumanizing misinformation that is fueling genocide. Dropsite news reports that Google is a “key entity” supporting Netanyahu’s messaging and amplifying misinformation about the famine in Gaza.
The week in pawtriarchy
My spirit animal may well be a raccoon in Kentucky, who recently ate a few too many fermented peaches discarded by a nearby distillery and passed out in a pool of dumpster water. Luckily a passing nurse started doing “compression-only CPR” until the little fella revived. Kentucky Mist Distillery, which makes peach-flavoured moonshine, shared a video of the raccoon resuscitation with a note saying: “PLEASE, DRINK RESPONSIBLY!!” I imagine that particular raccoon has learned that gorging yourself on fermented dumpster peaches can be whiskey business.
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