“Action plan” is one of those phrases you can only really trust when it’s coming out of Keanu Reeves or Jason Statham’s mouth; left to the ministrations of a guy like current White House incumbent Donald Trump, the in-isolation cool words—action! plan!—tend to shift and mutate, transforming from thoughts of diving through windows or not looking at explosions to something far grosser and more corrupt.
Take, for instance, the White House’s new “AI Action Plan,” which Trump has begun rolling out this week, including in a speech at an AI Summit where he encouraged U.S. copyright holders to pretty much give up on their dreams of actually getting paid when AI tech folk train their large language models on copyrighted works. Citing an old standby—the classic “Treating people with respect for creativity or ownership of their own stuff is just asking for China to beat us” defense—Trump stated in a press conference today that “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or whatever you’ve studied you’re expected to pay for.” He failed to follow-up that up with what would seem to be a natural corollary—i.e., that any business model that’s entirely reliant on theft in order to function may have some fundamental issues—and instead stated that, “You just can’t do that because it’s not do-able. And if you’re going to try and do that, you’re not going to have a successful program.”
Per Deadline, the actual Action Plan mostly sidesteps the copyright issue, although Trump wasn’t shy in his remarks about suggesting “common sense solutions,” including trying to float a line that we don’t pay authors every time we learn something from their books, right? In case that wasn’t sufficiently distracting from the whole “just give up and let ’em take it” element, Trump also issued one of his periodic executive orders this evening, titled “Preventing Woke AI In The Federal Government,” and, yeah, there’s the ol’ familiar headache that sets in every time we have to read something off that increasingly recognizable dark blue letterhead. The EO is exactly what it sounds like: A call for any LLMs the U.S. government works with to be free of “ideology” or DEI, which should be a neat trick when Trump is actively encouraging developers to dump copyrighted works—often considered a pretty hefty breeding ground for “ideology”—straight into their machines. (We’d suggest the LLMs cross-index “doublethink,” but we’re pretty sure the source material wouldn’t pass muster.)
Mostly bloviating, but the upshot is that Trump has staked out pretty firm ground in terms of all the lawsuits currently brewing between copyright holders—ranging from individual authors all the way up to Disney and Universal—and the AI firms, which are only going to get more fractious up until the point that the courts get some official rulings on the books.
