Melania Trump, White House Officials Spout Nonsense About AI

Melania Trump made rare public remarks to kick off a press conference for the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education on Thursday, grandly proclaiming the potential for AI technology. “I won’t be surprised if AI becomes known as the greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America,” she said in a sweeping yet mostly generic statement that itself could have been ChatGPT-generated.

The First Lady is not an official member of the task force, which was established in April and is chaired by Michael Kratsios, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a former chief of staff for venture capitalist Peter Thiel. She led the meeting by mentioning self-driving cars and robotically-assisted surgery but also heralded “innovations of first-generation humanoids,” presumably a reference to Tesla‘s flashy Optimus robots. CEO Elon Musk recently predicted that the model will someday account for 80 percent of the automaker’s value and that the company will produce as many as one million of them by 2027 — but Tesla is reportedly struggling to finish the 5,000 they were slated to complete this year, and the Optimus bots that have been rolled out for publicity stunts are always partially operated by humans, not fully autonomous. At any rate, they haven’t even made it to market, and “humanoids” certainly do not walk among us.

“The robots are here,” the First Lady nonetheless declared on Thursday to a group that included the CEOs of Google and IBM. “Our future is no longer science fiction.”

This was hardly the only nonsense uttered at the 40-minute press briefing, which was light on policy specifics but heavy on praise for the AI industry as a whole. David Sacks, the White House czar of AI and cryptocurrency as well as a Musk and Thiel ally, adopted the Cabinet technique of shamelessly flattering his boss by saying that a July 23 speech by the president was “the most important speech that’s been given on AI by any official.” In that speech, at a “Winning the AI Race” event, Trump digressively rambled about tariffs, transgender women in sports, California car emissions rules, and “getting rid of woke.” He also mentioned that he didn’t care for the term “artificial intelligence,” explaining, “I don’t like anything that’s artificial,” and called on American companies “to join us in rejecting poisonous Marxism in our technology.”

Sacks quoted a line from Trump’s speech that described AI as “a beautiful baby that’s born,” adding, “He is right about that.” He went on to predict that AI is going to “make our jobs more satisfying” while dismissing fears of people losing employment due to increasing automation: “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. Sacks warned, however, that while American workers may not be replaced by AI, they might have their jobs taken over by “someone who uses AI better than you.”

Energy secretary Chris Wright, who does not believe in climate change and formerly served as CEO for an oil company that specializes in fracking, was also on hand to address the media and fellow members of the task force. He did not seem to have a strong grasp of what AI is or how it works. “At its essence, artificial intelligence takes electricity and turns it into intelligence, empowering Americans,” he said. “We’re using it to understand the basic fabric of the universe.” Prior to the event, Wright appeared on Fox News, where he made equally outlandish claims about the power of AI. “I’m working every day on using AI to figure out how to cure cancer, or launch fusion energy, or understand dark matter.” He did not share any of the scientific advances he has made in those areas with help from chatbots.

Linda McMahon, secretary of education, was mistakenly referring to AI as “A1” as recently as April, but said on Thursday that she has come to find the technology “incredibly helpful.” She announced a forthcoming visit to the Alpha School in Austin, one of a new network of schools that employ adult “guides” instead of teachers and have students work on core subjects through AI programs for just two hours a day, with a curriculum that avoids any political or social issues. McMahon said the Education Department was explicitly encouraging “the integration of AI in teaching, learning, and school operations,” and that children need to be prepared for “the AI-driven world.”

And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins took the floor to note that “AI is reshaping how agricultural knowledge is imparted and absorbed,” theorizing that AI-enhanced farming systems will “make our food supply more nutritious.” She was followed by Lori Chavez-DeRemer, secretary of labor, who vowed that her department’s job training programs “will help fill the mortgage-paying jobs that AI will create.” The U.S. job market is currently in a sharp downturn despite the increased prevalence of AI tools such as large language models (LLMs), and there is deep skepticism in the industry that AI will create more opportunities for employment. Last month, Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer at Google X, the company’s “moonshot” research lab, called the idea “100 percent crap.”

Yet no inklings of doubt were to be heard at the White House as Trump officials laid out their utopian vision of a country that would best China in the AI arms race, reach peak efficiency, raise a generation of tech-whiz children, and enter what Rollins called a “golden age of prosperity,” all thanks to the dazzling genius of Silicon Valley engineers. The parts that weren’t empty blather or fawning over the president and the First Lady sounded like nothing so much as a victory lap for accomplishments we haven’t actually seen from this administration. Sacks, however, did laud Trump for immediately rolling back regulation on the AI companies that are starting to face wrongful death lawsuits over the suicides of teens allegedly encouraged by chatbots to end their own lives. In sum, then, another day’s hard work for a brain trust whose most important duty is to congratulate themselves — and, of course, the praise-hungry man who appointed them.