What did Donald Trump do today?

He unveiled a chatbot that would already have been fired for disloyalty if it were one of his human employees.

Trump signed an executive order today establishing a chatbot service, America.gov. It's a simple Large Language Model (or LLM) intended to answer questions about laws, government services, and other information of interest to constituents.

Within minutes of its launch, social media commenters were impressed with its accuracy in at least a few regards. For example, it correctly identified Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. 

 It refuted Trump's belief that he has an "Article II power to do whatever I want."

It identified several of the many reasons that Trump's destruction of the East Wing of the White House was not legal.

It correctly identified Congress, not the executive branch, as the body with the authority to levy tariffs.

 

For good measure, it admitted what Trump does not: that tariffs are taxes, and that it is not foreign governments that pay them.

It agreed with the elected Democrats Trump tried to have prosecuted for saying that American military personnel had an obligation to disobey illegal orders.

 

It even flatly rejected one of Trump's more infamous medical theories.

It correctly refused to exonerate Trump for rerunning a 2024 campaign ad using taxpayer dollars just because Trump insisted it was a "public service announcement."

And, in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, it refused to talk about Trump the way he talks about himself.

 

It's worth saying that, like any LLM, America.gov is not really "thinking" or "saying" anything. It's simply a software program processing information in its databases according to a series of internal rules.

The good news, from Trump's perspective, is that the "problem" of the America.gov software accurately summarizing facts that virtually everyone but Trump acknowledges, is that it can be "fixed." LLMs are only as accurate as the information they're allowed to use, and they can easily be tweaked to give desired results along an ideological spectrum. Trump can also order it to draw from sources that give the answers he wants, rather than the vast database of government records, most of which he's been unable to purge.

That's exactly what Trump's political patron Elon Musk did with the LLM developed for Twitter. After Musk was embarrassed by "Grok" giving unflattering (but accurate) answers to questions about Musk himself and seemingly contradicting Musk's fringe-right ideology, he ordered it to be tweaked. Within days, Grok was calling itself "Mechahitler" and making unprompted racist and antisemitic remarks. 

Trump is heavily financially invested in the AI industry, which may account for his unwillingness to even consider regulating it, and his politically toxic embrace of unpopular data centers. 

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if the President of the United States lives inside a bubble of lies or fantasy—and that's true whether or not a computer says so.