Experts also warn that it could create a chilling effect when it comes to developers who might feel under pressure when aligning model outputs and datasets with White House rhetoric to secure federal dollars for their cash-burning companies, reported TechCrunch.
The order also came the same day the White House published Trump’s “AI Action Plan,” which shifts national priorities away from societal risk and puts the spotlight on developing AI infrastructure, cutting red tape for tech companies, as well as shoring up national security and competing with China.
The order also instructs the director of the Office of Management and Budget, along with the administrator of the Federal Procurement Policy, the administrator of the Federal Procurement Policy, the admisnistrator of General Services, and the director of the Office of Science and Tech Policy to issue guidance to other agencies on how to comply.
On Wednesday, during an AI event held by All-in Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum, Trump said, “Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,” also adding. “I will be signing an order banning the federal government from procuring AI technology that has been infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas, such as critical race theory, which is ridiculous. And from now on, the U.S. government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness, and strict impartiality.”
Analysing whether or not the process is impartial or objective might come as a difficult challenge in some cases. Philip Seargeant, a senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University, reported for TechCrunch that nothing can ever be objective.
“One of the fundamental tenets of sociolinguistics is that language is never neutral,” Seargeant said. “So the idea that you can ever get pure objectivity is a fantasy.”
As a response to the order, Rumman Chowdhury, data scientist and CEO of nonprofit Humane Intelligence, and former US science envoy for AI, said, “Anything [the Trump administration doesn’t] like is immediately tossed into this pejorative pile of woke.
More so, Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, also reported that it is “clearly intended as viewpoint discrimination, since [the government] just signed a contract with Grok,”
He also added in an email interview for TechCrunch that “The right question is this: would they ban Grok, the AI they just signed a large contract with, because it has been deliberately engineered to give politically charged answers?” and that “If not, it is clearly designed to discriminate against a particular viewpoint."
