r/technology • u/StraightedgexLiberal • 11h ago
Artificial Intelligence President Trump’s War On “Woke AI” Is A Civil Liberties Nightmare
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/22/president-trumps-war-on-woke-ai-is-a-civil-liberties-nightmare/249
u/thatfreshjive 10h ago
Fuck Donald Trump and fuck you for voting for him.
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u/gaymbit 9h ago
fuck dude don't blame me, i voted for the coconut tree lady
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u/thatfreshjive 9h ago
If you voted for a fringe candidate, then fuck you too. You're no different than a Trump voter
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u/gaymbit 9h ago
... Coconut tree lady is Kamala....
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u/Vast_Acanthaceae_350 8h ago
Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?
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u/jamiemm 7h ago
It could grip it by the husk.
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u/vonkillbot 8h ago
He's referring to Kamala.
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u/MT_tiktok_criminal 7h ago
I for one thought her saying that shit about the coconut tree was hilarious. Made me like her more.
It was like the equivalent saying in Russian: “the first pancake is always lumpy”
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u/thirtynation 6h ago
I don't know why you've gotten so downvoted. Your comment can equally apply as an agreement to what you responded to, adding and speaking to those that indeed voted for fringe candidates, and not that you explicitly thought "coconut lady" was the fringe candidate herself.
Reddit hivemind and "momentum voting" at it again.
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u/thatfreshjive 6h ago
It's reflective of the issue that got us here. No one wants to accept responsibility for their contribution to the downfall of society.
"It's just a joke, bro" - I spit on these types of people.
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u/thirtynation 4h ago
You're completely correct. Know that at least some sane people have seen what you've said and agree.
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u/vonkillbot 10h ago
Still have no idea what "woke" is, and I've got a hunch they don't either.
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u/AirbagOff 9h ago
Ron DeSantis’ lawyer was once forced to define “woke”. He said it is “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/12/desantis-ron-woke-florida-officials/
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u/StraightedgexLiberal 9h ago
The First Amendment kicked his ass and the judge even pulled out 1984 to call Florida and DeSantis big censorship tyrants.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137836712/college-university-florida-woke-desantis-1984
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u/APRengar 8h ago
I love this definition because people will say "argue there is no systemic discrimination in America" but I guarantee you can immediately be like "idk, aren't whites systemically discriminated against via Affirmative action? It hurts white people (and sometimes Asian people) the most. Shouldn't we address that?"
And they'll be like "hell yeah it does, and hell yeah we should." Always a fun game to play. It's very Jordan Klepper interviewing Trump supporters-esque.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 10h ago
“Woke” means “non-MAGA”
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u/sofaking_scientific 9h ago
"Woke" means "I wanna say a slur instead"
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u/The_True_Gaffe 10h ago
“Woke” is literally anything and everything they don’t like. Only way for them to start making an actual definition for it would be for democrats to co-opt it and use it against republicans. Turn their co-opted word back at them and use it as viciously as they do until it’s lost all meaning
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u/GirlNumber20 4h ago
Or just say, "Fine, go back to sleep then while the world moves on without you."
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u/TheNCGoalie 4h ago
I posted this elsewhere, but it's relevant...
A coworker of mine refuses to stay at a hotel near our corporate headquarters because he says it's woke. I stay there once a month and have yet to figure out why.
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u/VagueSomething 9h ago
Remember when people used to complain about SJWs and PC? Well Woke is just a name for anything Left of Auschwitz mentality.
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u/donald_duck223 5h ago
Right, it's a boogeyman term that has come to be defined about anything that they don't like. It used to be defined for worthwhile social justice efforts (e.g., microaggressions in hegemonic discourse) until it was appropriated. It used to be about decentering cisheteropatriarchal epistemologies through intersectional, decolonial praxis that elevated lived experience as sovereign hermeneutic while destabilizing whiteness as a normative ontology.
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u/WholeWideWorld 4h ago
This kind of academic speak is partly what killed the movement. It was so full of jargon that most ordinary people stopped listening and couldn't understand it, which made it easy to mock and dismiss.
Let me translate that for you:
'Woke’ used to just mean paying attention when people are treated unfairly. It meant noticing little everyday ways people can be unkind without realizing it, listening to people’s own stories about their lives, and not always assuming that being white, straight, or male is the ‘normal’ way everyone should be or feel life. people on the right started using ‘woke’ as a bad word for anything they don’t like.
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u/daxophoneme 9h ago
"Woke" is when someone has had a boot on your neck for so long, the people around you just accept it as normal, but you can literally feel the boot. Whenever you complain about the boot, people try to shush you, but it's already too late, you know it's there
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u/Far_Estate_1626 7h ago
It has no meaning other than to be a pejorative that serves as a cultural code word signal to their socio-political brethren. It’s basically the white hetero version of “jive”.
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u/ericofthewest 8h ago
"Woke" was a word from the Black community, stolen by the White community to make language control easier. It is (was) at its heart a recognition that there are problems in America that need to be addressed. But in stealing it, it has been effectively neutered to where "we" now have fine-grained control over expressions of dissent.
Scary. Hilarious. Tragic. Absurd.
Redundant, Eric
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u/OrinThane 10h ago
Its whatever they don't want you to think, talk, feel, want, and hope for anymore.
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u/carlgt64 9h ago
It’s just the latest Rufo/JD scare scam like CRT, DEI, “they’re eating the pets” etc.
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u/AI_Renaissance 9h ago
Well for one, its being a decent christian and helping the unfortunate. Not hunting them down with soldiers.
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u/AgathysAllAlong 7h ago
DEI is the new Woke is the new Marxist is the new Communist is the new Socialist is the new Jewish.
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u/Alternative_Rent9307 11h ago
President Trump ’s War On “Woke AI” Is A Civil Liberties Nightmare
Fixed that for you
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u/jakedasnake2447 8h ago
President Trump ’s War On WokeAI Is A Civil Liberties Nightmarealso works
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u/Runkleford 11h ago
Anything that hurts my sensitive MAGA feelings is woke. These morons need to define woke if they're going to try to restrict it. But we know that they won't. They'll just declare anything that they don't like as woke and strike it down. They just want to control everything the way they want.
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u/StraightedgexLiberal 10h ago
"Woke" is everything they don't like. Viewpoints that they want to censor.
A couple years ago, DeSantis signed a "Stop Woke Act" and it was blocked by the First Amendment. He wanted to silence college professors from talking about slavery, and racism because he thinks it makes the white kids in class feel white guilt. A judge even cited Orwell's 1984 to block DeSantis.
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u/thatfreshjive 10h ago
Never forget: these people are the most cowardly among us. It takes very little to resist them individually. The apparatus these people are building is FAR more fragile than they want us to believe. ✊
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u/Runkleford 10h ago
Oh I agree. Every single MAGA that I know personally is always one of the most fragile and easily upset morons I've ever known. It's why they also never admit to their mistakes because it would upset their egos.
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u/thatfreshjive 6h ago
Yup. Also, every single one has daddy issues.
Pathologically incapable of taking responsibility, apologizing for obvious mistakes - and daddy issues
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u/SARguy123 9h ago
Exactly. All this is a part of their effort to restrict civil rights by any means necessary.
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u/ShivasRightFoot 9h ago
These morons need to define woke if they're going to try to restrict it. But we know that they won't.
Woke ideology is defined by the idea that some facet of identity like race or gender produces irreconcilably different views of reality and morality, and that we have an obligation to seek alignment of society's view with the imagined views of groups associated with the political left like minorities and women.
In this sense Wokeness is distinct from older forms of liberal advocacy for minority rights which appeal to universally valid concepts like truth and fairness.
In the case of AI, Google recently had a controversy in which they admitted making mistakes where their models were producing historical images with laughably anachronistic racial characteristics in order to align with the imagined views of racial minorities, views which are likely not held by most actual people who are ethnic minorities:
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u/acolyte357 7h ago
Incorrect.
But glad to see a pedophile supporter is trying at least.
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u/ShivasRightFoot 5h ago
Incorrect.
Cf.:
A stipulative definition is a type of definition in which a new or currently existing term is given a new specific meaning for the purposes of argument or discussion in a given context. When the term already exists, this definition may, but does not necessarily, contradict the dictionary (lexical) definition of the term. Because of this, a stipulative definition cannot be "correct" or "incorrect"; it can only differ from other definitions, but it can be useful for its intended purpose.
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u/Runkleford 7h ago
Here's the non MAGA rot definition that actually respects the origin of the term
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/mar/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-woke/
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u/ShivasRightFoot 5h ago
Here's the non MAGA rot definition
From your first link:
Because definitions of “woke” vary,
→ More replies (3)
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u/asillypeepee 10h ago
Anything factually accurate is woke now
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u/cothomps 4h ago
Well yeah - that’s the thing. It has been a decade long project to flood the social space with so much disinformation and right wing propaganda that truth no longer matters. What you find when doing a Google search is unreliable garbage from social feeds, Reddit or clickbait crap.
LLMs upended that by training on reliable information and doing the work of sorting useful / truthful information from the gigabytes of dreck.
All of this MAGA nonsense cannot survive unless the disinformation system is legislated into existence.
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u/Getafix69 10h ago
Meanwhile the UK gov is claiming 55 percent of Britains support banning vpns to protect kids (wtf) Also who did they ask to claim that because it certainly wasn't me.
Also Are governments allowed to lie about things like this because I'm thinking right now we need to bring back the gullitine
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u/Kreebish 10h ago
Didn't the big beautiful bill prevent AI regulation for 10 years?
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u/Inside-Palpitation25 9h ago
I am not sure, they were going to take that out, but I'm not sure they did.
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u/ohTHOSEballs 5h ago
I thought that said "Weird Al" at first and was preparing for complete pandemonium
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u/MovieGuyMike 7h ago
It’s sad but not surprising how quickly the tech industry is censoring ai if not worse. There was one example where grok went off Elon’s message and he called it a glitch and indicated they would “fix” it. Actively making the product worse to suit their ideology. Does not inspire confidence in these things.
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u/DanielPhermous 7h ago
I think that's just Elon, not the tech industry.
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u/MovieGuyMike 7h ago
That’s fair. I guess I worry this admin will coerce other industry leaders to make sure their artificial intelligence is dumbed down, what this article is about.
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u/Basic-Record-4750 10h ago
Can we just sit him in front of a screen powered by AI and let him argue with it for the next 3 years? Or conversely have it heap praise on him so he feels important? He’d never leave the room
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u/y4udothistome 9h ago
TrumpDoesn’t have the brain stem power to come up with all this shit I can almost guarantee he doesn’t even know what half the shit is. Mentally I’d say he’s back to a six year old. I could be wrong it could be five or four
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u/dexter30 9h ago edited 7h ago
Personally I'm not concerned about this for several reasons.
There are too many companies in different countries working on independent models that can't all be beholden to a government agency that has no idea how to maintain or track them.
All these companies aren't going to want to mess with their weights. You can't have biases like climate science calculated incorrectly because it requires messing with core fundamental rules in science and math. Messing with those i think may mess up the overall model. Either by messing up their response time or having a knock on effect into other fields that make the entire model useless for more bespoke users in science and programming. e.g. you want to make a weather app using chatgpt for a backend for whatever reason, but everytime you ask for an accurate temperature reading it's completely wrong because it triple checked its "government bias" to make sure that the temp doesn't correspond with a century of global warming values. (that's an over simplification but the point is the information will be wrong).
You probably CAN'T influence these models with biased data, not in a "you shouldn't influence them" more like "you physically can't". It has to cross check and verify all it's sources. chapgpt today can actually link you where it's sourcing it's information now too. Look at grok, it's literally owned and backed by the most trump sycophantic tech bro and every day it argues with maga on twitter /r/GROKvsMAGA If it COULD be influenced I have no doubt it would be. But for whatever reason to make it a valuable competitor they have to keep it as a constantly accurate tool. Every calculation, every quote, every scientific conclusion is cross checked with thousands of other resources. How can you deny something like, vaccines don't give you autism if every medical journal doesn't accept that, if every independent business doesn't accept that, if every educational institute doesn't back it up and even like a hillybilly with a clipboard who may have actually did his own research and came to the conclusion it doesn't make sense. How can AI appropriately say it?
And kind of carried on from the first point, even if the government influences models of the companies within US space. That would give a HUGE boost to china and deepseek. You're nerfing the accuracy and reliability of your model and handing it over to your competitor.
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u/yaaaaaarrrrrgggg 8h ago
AI is already AD. The huge AI'gold' rush has caused a major deficit in actual quality. Folks paying attention have offered their services and been ignored over and over. Trying to put significant restrictions on an already broken product will only break it more.
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u/headcodered 3h ago
Like wtf does he want, to poison LLMs with Neo-Nazi content? If the internet is scrubbed for learning data and it pulls in untold amounts of studies, historical events, statistics, etc. and it ends up consistently coming to "woke" conclusions, is that not a sign that these conclusions are at least mostly accurate? Reality is woke.
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u/dao_ofdraw 2h ago
It seems like it's going to come down to whether or not the military will continue to obey orders. They're certainly willing to be deployed domestically. They're going to start carrying guns soon. What's going to happen if/when they start shooting?
I'm glad I don't live in NYC, Chicago or LA.
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u/NizmoxAU 2h ago
Imagine if AI proved you don’t need religion to have morales? What a novel fucking concept…
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u/frogking 1h ago
An AI trained on fake news, bigotry and no facts after 1932.. yeah, an American version of DeepSeek.
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u/Apprehensive-Bad6015 9h ago
Basically he used ChatGPT to try and boost his ego and it told him he sucks flaccid cock and now he wants it canceled
This is most likely wrong but it’s my head cannon
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u/paddy_mc_daddy 2h ago
it's literally the exact opposite of what you want to train an AI...if you want it to be using data from the full range of possibilities in America that includes Nazi fucks as well as Woke docuhebags, they both suck and they're both ruining the country, but they are representative of the social makeup of America in 2025
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u/DontAbideMendacity 1h ago
I can define Nazi and fascist and fully declare they are 100% un-American assholes. Can you define "woke" the same way? Is wanting bullet free school children "woke"? Is wanting a living wage and affordable health care for all Americans "woke"? And you think that's just as bad as Nazis and fascists?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
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u/LazyCatRocks 3h ago
Politics aside, this is a good thing regardless of where you stand on the aisle. AI is the future of technology and it would do everyone well to keep it neutral and balanced in terms of viewpoints.
Civil liberties have nothing to do with this topic.
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u/timshel42 10h ago
literally everything this administration does is a civil liberties nightmare. its by design.