debtFormer President Donald Trump shared his mixed feelings about artificial intelligence with YouTuber Logan Paul on Thursday, describing the machine as a “superpower” that can write “beautifully,” but also calling its capabilities “alarming.”
Paul's comments on his podcast “Impaulsive” offer some insight into how the 78-year-old presidential candidate feels about rapidly advancing technology that concerns 49% of Americans.
Concerns that deepfakes increase the risk of nuclear war
Trump said he saw a deepfake video of himself promoting a product and found it so convincing that he doubted its authenticity. He also expressed concern that deepfakes could do more harm than this, explaining that a deepfake video of the US president saying, “We just launched 13 nuclear missiles… and they will hit their target in 12 minutes and 59 seconds” could encourage a hostile leader to launch a preemptive retaliatory strike. Trump said the fictional leader asked Elon Musk if there was a way to tell if the video was authentic, to which Musk reportedly replied, “There's no way.”
The idea that false alarms could increase the risk of nuclear war is not entirely hypothetical. In September 1983, at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet early warning system falsely detected five incoming missiles. Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov chose to ignore the reports, potentially averting a nuclear catastrophe. More recently, in December 2016, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif was fooled by fake news into issuing nuclear threats to Israel. Experts warn that deepfakes could increase the threat of nuclear war for years to come.
Energy challenges and competition with China
Trump stressed the importance of the US being at the forefront of technological developments. “We need to stay ahead of China,” he said, noting that AI systems are extremely energy intensive – needed to run the computer chips used to train the systems and to keep them from overheating – and that environmentalists' concerns about energy use could “hold us back” and cause the US to fall behind China.
So far, the most important factors for AI developers have proven to be computing chips and talent, not energy. But in April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed concern that energy could become a bottleneck in the future. Though China remains the world leader in renewable energy, big tech companies have been investing in clean energy to offset their carbon emissions for years.
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The fear that environmentalists would lose the US to China has been a common theme for Trump, who in 2012 Tweeted “The concept of global warming was invented by the Chinese to make American manufacturing uncompetitive,” he said. Later, in January 2020, he said that climate change is not a hoax, but opinions on this point remain divided.
Bipartisan consensus on AI risks
In his interview with Paul, Trump called Biden “the worst president our country has ever had,” emblematic of the polarization of American politics, but concerns about the risks posed by AI appear to bridge the partisan divide.
Last October, Biden passed an executive order aimed at addressing some of the dangers of AI, including deepfakes, and preserving the U.S. advantage in AI. In May 2024, a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) released an “AI Roadmap” that called for putting guardrails in place against those risks and would invest billions of dollars in the technology.
Trump recounted meeting with “super geniuses” in San Francisco who helped him understand AI. “They gave me $12 million to run my campaign,” he said. “Four years ago, they probably wouldn't have given me that.”
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