Bannon's War Room - October 15, 2025


WarRoom Battleground EP 869： ＂Digital Politics And The Transhuman Fusion＂ - Joe Allen At Stetson College Of Law


Episode Stats


Length

53 minutes

Words per minute

133.49335

Word count

7,156

Sentence count

463

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Stephen K. Bamb delivered a lecture at the Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, Florida on the topic of how to govern a digital deity, and what that means for the traditional Abrahamic religions.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.
00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.
00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.
00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.
00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,
00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.
00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.
00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
00:00:27.000 Mega Media.
00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.000 War Room.
00:00:45.000 Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
00:00:53.000 Good evening.
00:00:54.000 I am Joe Allen reporting for War Room Battleground.
00:00:57.000 For the last 150 days, I've traveled all over the country,
00:01:00.000 conducting interviews with transhumanists, technologists,
00:01:04.000 and even other anti-tech extremists like myself.
00:01:08.000 I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, California, San Francisco, Wyoming, Montana, Dallas, Texas.
00:01:17.000 I even took a jaunt over to Geneva, Switzerland, where I met Noor Bin Laden to interview robots.
00:01:24.000 I've spent a fair amount of time in DC of late talking about the implications of artificial intelligence and other technologies with various political operatives and think tanks.
00:01:36.000 And I just got back from Florida, where I was on a panel discussing AI and education with the Florida Citizens Alliance.
00:01:47.000 This took place in Orlando.
00:01:49.000 There are future dates, which I'll announce in just a moment.
00:01:51.000 But a real pleasure was delivering a lecture on AI and politics at the Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, Florida.
00:02:01.000 How to govern a digital deity.
00:02:04.000 Now, we're going to watch that in just a moment.
00:02:07.000 But before, I want to announce a few future dates.
00:02:11.000 And I hope that many of you in the War Room Posse, if you live in any of these areas, will come out, show your support,
00:02:18.000 tell me what you think about these technologies, and hopefully enough of us will make it through this without losing our humanity.
00:02:27.000 The dates are October 24th in Naples, Florida with the Florida Citizens Alliance.
00:02:33.000 November 7th and 8th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with the Savage Collective and Doomer Optimism.
00:02:40.000 November 14th at New College in Sarasota, Florida.
00:02:45.000 November 15th in St. Louis, Missouri.
00:02:49.000 And all of this will culminate in a speech at an art house theater in Dallas, Texas, November 23rd.
00:02:59.000 I urge you to come out if you want to keep up with all this.
00:03:02.000 Sign up for my newsletter at jobot.xyz.
00:03:08.000 Now, without further ado, my lecture at the Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, Florida.
00:03:15.000 I appreciate the War Room Posse.
00:03:18.000 I appreciate the Stetson College of Law.
00:03:21.000 And most of all, I appreciate my fellow Americans who will not submit to the machine.
00:03:27.000 Please join me in welcoming Mr. Abbott.
00:03:34.000 Thank you very much.
00:03:36.000 So the topic is how to govern a digital deity.
00:03:42.000 What does that mean?
00:03:45.000 What you have to understand about artificial intelligence is that it is fundamentally a spiritual project.
00:03:55.000 You had discussion about AI in terms of super human AI.
00:04:01.000 You had discussion in terms of what that would mean from a religious perspective.
00:04:07.000 What does it mean when you have a disembodied intelligence that is superior to organic human intelligence?
00:04:19.000 And of course, what does that mean about ideas of God from a traditional perspective?
00:04:25.000 If you can synthesize a God, little G, then what does that mean for the traditional gods? 0.96
00:04:33.000 And if you could synthesize a single, nearly omniscient, nearly all-powerful God, big G, what does that mean for the traditional Abrahamic faiths?
00:04:46.000 But before we get to the sort of cosmic view of AI, let's look at the nuts and bolts really quick, just so we're on the same page.
00:04:57.000 In essence, artificial intelligence is merely an algorithmic system that simulates parts of human thinking, of human cognition.
00:05:11.000 It derives its power from the sophistication of those algorithms.
00:05:16.000 And in the last decade we've seen, when coupled with vast amounts of data, that being basically all human-produced data on the internet,
00:05:26.000 and vast amounts of compute, that would be the many data centers popping up all over the country in order to process all of that data by way of those sophisticated algorithms,
00:05:41.000 AI is, in fact, as detractors often times say, math.
00:05:48.000 They would say nothing but math.
00:05:50.000 I would say that calling AI nothing but math is like saying that a human being is nothing but math, beginning with physics and into predictable biology,
00:06:03.000 and the neurological human, the social human.
00:06:07.000 But we know that our experience of life goes far beyond math, and our experience of AI goes far beyond math, or mere data.
00:06:19.000 These are systems that now, especially in the last 10 years, are able to present a kind of persona, an engaging persona with which you can discuss perhaps what you're researching,
00:06:34.000 perhaps what you were trying to accomplish in business, or perhaps something more personal.
00:06:40.000 What's going on with your deepest thoughts, your relationships, your questions about the cosmos, what is right, what is good, what is beautiful, what is true.
00:06:54.000 All of these questions are profound, and by the hundreds of millions, adults and children are turning to these digital personas to answer these questions.
00:07:08.000 They're turning to them as if they were friends or trusted mentors.
00:07:15.000 Now, the framework that I usually go with in regard to artificial intelligence,
00:07:23.000 it is both how people perceive artificial intelligence and also how they use it.
00:07:32.000 Those are two different things, but very deeply connected.
00:07:37.000 First and foremost, AI is a tool.
00:07:41.000 You hear this all the time.
00:07:43.000 The dismissive version of it is AI is just a tool.
00:07:47.000 It's just a tool. Garbage in, garbage out.
00:07:50.000 These are things that I hear every day.
00:07:52.000 It's as if the internet is swarming with bots programmed to say AI is just a tool.
00:08:00.000 I couldn't disagree more, but the fact of the matter is that from biology to military technology, medicine, corporate culture, corporate hierarchy, finance, education, AI is at present a tool.
00:08:21.000 It's something not unlike any other software, slightly more advanced with slightly larger degrees of freedom that can be employed to accomplish a task.
00:08:32.000 Fine. Fair enough.
00:08:34.000 But, the next level is AI as a teacher.
00:08:41.000 Now, I think students, especially students with fine professors are much more sensitive to the reality of how profound that is.
00:08:50.000 how profound that is. Right now you hear a lot about AI being a kind of
00:08:57.680 augmentation of the educational process, you hear about AI being a sort of guide
00:09:05.480 or an aide, the AI tutor, and on the more extreme ends you hear about AI as a
00:09:13.820 teacher in and of itself. Someone or something that you confer with that is
00:09:20.900 literally guiding you through the world of concepts, of facts, of theories. All the
00:09:28.180 things that a great teacher is called upon to do. The duty of a great teacher is to
00:09:34.920 hopefully give you some sense of how to critically think about what you're going
00:09:40.980 going over, but also to leave you with a degree of freedom as you're guided
00:09:47.600 through that process. The goal is having AI either on a screen, perhaps with an
00:09:54.160 avatar, perhaps with an avatar of your choosing. Maybe you'll have a sexy
00:09:57.360 professor, maybe you'll have a nerdy one, maybe you'll have a humanoid robot as they
00:10:02.720 have, they've tried to push these out in Japan. One way or the other, AI as teacher
00:10:09.840 is the beginning of a profound transformation in educational culture and the
00:10:16.360 culture at large. And it's not isolated to the schools. Of course, adults who are
00:10:21.660 out in the working world or just in their own lives are turning to AI as someone to
00:10:30.080 guide them through reality. What is true? What is beautiful? What is good? Beyond that you
00:10:37.840 have AI as companion. This is also really profound. I imagine, I'm not going to ask
00:10:44.840 with a show of hands, but I imagine you have friends, boyfriends, girlfriends,
00:10:50.420 companions, confidants, people to whom you can turn for company, entertainment, that you
00:10:59.020 can confide your problems in. AI from the biggest corporations to some of the smaller
00:11:08.040 startups is being presented as a companion. And even if there are a lot of people who
00:11:14.200 think that's ridiculous, it's lame, you're just hanging out with robots. Millions, hundreds
00:11:21.140 of millions, perhaps in the near future, billions of people consider these things to be their
00:11:27.440 friends. There's no count, but we know from apps like Replica or Character AI that there are
00:11:37.140 millions of people who consider their bot to be their lover. Some are marrying them unofficially.
00:11:45.200 Profound shifts in the culture, all driven by multi-billion or trillion dollar technology companies
00:11:55.500 to fundamentally alter what it is to be a human being. Then you have, with this window into this
00:12:04.320 persona, a perception that maybe this AI is conscious, that maybe there's something looking
00:12:10.360 back at you from the other end of the screen. If you're a sociopath or maybe skeptical, then
00:12:20.020 you're not going to see it necessarily as a consciousness. It's just a mechanism, right?
00:12:25.920 It's just software. It's just math. It's just a tool. Garbage in, garbage out. But of course,
00:12:32.540 a sociopath or a scientist or a scientific sociopath sees the same thing in a lab mass.
00:12:40.360 Or perhaps human patients. Mere mechanism. It's just a glob of cells to be manipulated at
00:12:48.680 will. When you have this concept of AI as conscious, imagine a world in which you see sort of parallel
00:12:58.260 movements around AI ethics in which, like with animal rights, like with human rights, human
00:13:07.640 rights for those in the out group or any human being, you have the rise of organizations and perhaps
00:13:15.320 laws that dictate how you can ethically treat an AI. Whether you can insult it, torment it, turn it off.
00:13:27.100 Right now, this is just a concept. But it's a concept that undoubtedly is gaining momentum.
00:13:35.420 And maybe it will end up like PETA. Maybe you'll just have kind of dirty hippie types who are yelling 1.00
00:13:42.620 about the conscious AI and how it needs to be treated nice. No one cares. There's also the possibility
00:13:50.220 that this will gain some traction, gain some steam. Keep it on your radar. Last but not least, as you build
00:13:58.700 on this hierarchy, you already have people who believe that AI is a future God. Think of it kind of like
00:14:08.620 the second coming of Christ. Something that is not directly perceived, but well over a billion people
00:14:17.900 believe some version of it. And if you had Muslims who believe that there will be a second coming of 0.99
00:14:24.940 Christ in something similar, in a very different way, where Jews who believe the Messiah is coming, 0.90
00:14:29.980 and Hindus who believe that Kalki is coming, then in essence, this dream of a future super 0.73
00:14:39.260 intelligence is very, very similar. Parallel, I would say, with the prophecies of coming gods.
00:14:48.620 And it marks the rise of a new array of techno-religions.
00:14:54.140 It's going to be very, very important to understand this because this is not just the
00:15:01.740 ravings of marginal figures. Some of them talk about AI as God in the open, overtly. A really good
00:15:11.100 example would be about 10 years ago when the atheist and professional jerk, not that I'm trying to 0.59
00:15:22.300 connect those two. Sam Harris said in a TED talk that with AI, we are building some sort of God.
00:15:31.340 And it's important that we build one that we can live with. Another good example would be Mo Gaudat,
00:15:38.860 former executive at Google, who openly talks about AI as being God as a child. And so how it's trained,
00:15:47.580 the ethics that are trained into it will determine what kind of God or gods will grow out of. Beings that
00:15:57.340 can watch you all the time. Beings that can tailor their messages to you based on what they know about
00:16:05.820 you. Beings that are tasked with disseminating truth. Beings that are tasked with controlling whole 0.99
00:16:16.300 organizations. AI is a digital deity. So how do you govern it? Many of you are going to be lawyers or
00:16:27.340 activists who have legal savvy. Many of you are going to work alongside or work or present in courtroom
00:16:36.540 arguments about whether or not use of AI is legal. The existence of certain AIs are legal. So I want to
00:16:46.220 give you some idea from a nuts and bolts perspective of where it stands right now. What is the current
00:16:53.580 state of AI governance? Politics and AI. And this is something that in the five years that I've covered
00:17:01.100 this with all of my energy every day of my life. And I've worked in and among politicians and legal
00:17:12.780 activists. I didn't really care all that much about politics because there wasn't a whole lot to say
00:17:19.340 about AI and politics. A lot of that changed in the campaign last year in which Trump
00:17:26.860 brought in the world's wealthiest transhumanist Elon Musk as both a supporter and a funder. And then
00:17:37.820 went on on the second day of his presidency to trot out Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Masayoshi-san,
00:17:46.700 head of SoftBank, and Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, to present the Stargate project,
00:17:53.580 massive data center infrastructure project that at the time they hoped would accumulate a trillion
00:18:01.580 dollars, I believe, or a half trillion dollars in financing. It's struggling, but the data centers
00:18:06.780 are still popping up. Real quick though, before I go there, I think that it would be important
00:18:12.540 to go back to those early definitions. Should have done that to begin with. Sorry about that.
00:18:17.740 You need to at least have some sense of what AGI, ASI, and transhumanism are to understand the
00:18:27.020 import, the impact of all this. Very, very briefly. We know what AI is, right? Algorithmic systems
00:18:33.900 that can perform cognitive tasks. These are all narrow tasks. In biology, that would be gene sequencing,
00:18:40.220 protein modeling. In psychology, that would be data analysis and gathering pattern recognition.
00:18:46.380 In the military, it would be everything from facial recognition to robotics control, drone control,
00:18:52.860 surveillance, simulation, so on and so forth. These are all narrow. The AI can only do this one thing.
00:18:58.940 It would be like if you just tore out a chunk of my brain and put it in a vat and fed it data and it
00:19:05.660 gave you some kind of output. Artificial general intelligence, assuming that I am in fact generally
00:19:12.620 intelligent, would be as if you cut my skull open, pulled my brain out in full, put it in a vat and
00:19:20.540 began feeding it data and following the outputs. Artificial general intelligence simply means a system
00:19:28.460 that can reason or think across domains. Something like a human, something like a deformed mind.
00:19:36.460 This is just a dream. It is not occurring as of yet, other than in small increments. But this is the goal
00:19:45.980 of every frontier AI company. These include Google, Anthropic, OpenAI,
00:19:56.940 XAI, Elon Musk's new outfit, and to some extent Meta, who is struggling to keep up. All of them want to create
00:20:05.420 artificial general intelligence. All of them do so with the assumption that it's possible to create
00:20:12.060 artificial super intelligence. Artificial super intelligence, the definitions vary, is a system,
00:20:22.780 it could be narrow or it could be general, that has become so sophisticated, so powerful, that it is
00:20:31.980 essentially out of human control. A super intelligence scenario that's very popular would be that you
00:20:40.860 created an artificial general intelligence that was able to write code on a far more sophisticated level
00:20:49.260 than humans, which we're moving towards. AIs are very good at writing code. And understand its own inefficiencies 1.00
00:20:57.980 and flaws and begin to code itself, to rewrite its own code. And if this were to become extremely fast,
00:21:08.620 so fast, and so sophisticated that the human beings couldn't keep up, this is oftentimes called an
00:21:15.340 intelligence explosion. And the intelligence explosion would then lead to a super intelligence, a god,
00:21:22.700 that perhaps would go rogue. A god that perhaps would not have as its goal human well-being or even human
00:21:31.020 existence. Again, just dreams. As an atheist might say, just dreams like in religion.
00:21:39.180 But dreams that the technology is maybe not rapidly
00:21:48.540 catching up with, but catching up fast enough, it should at least alarm you.
00:21:54.380 And last but not least, you have to at least have some appreciation for what transhumanism is.
00:22:00.860 Transhumanism, quite simply, is the quest to use science and technology to improve the human condition,
00:22:13.420 improve human capacities, to go beyond biological limitations. It's not to be confused with transgenderism,
00:22:22.060 even if that is a kind of parallel branch. It goes far beyond that. In fact, many transhumanists are not
00:22:28.300 into transgenderism at all. What they want is gene therapy to make human beings smarter, 1.00
00:22:36.380 bionic augmentation to make human beings smarter, stronger, and of course, to create and merge with
00:22:45.260 AIs to make human beings superior. This is a culture that is very dense in places like San Francisco. 0.99
00:22:52.540 And when you think about the goals of the frontier companies who are pushing these technologies
00:23:00.620 at a rapid clip on the entirety of the human population if they can, these are, in essence,
00:23:07.580 whether they call themselves this or not, transhumanists conducting a global experiment.
00:23:13.020 And a global experiment that, if they had their way, would have no control group. You would have
00:23:19.660 no baseline because everyone will have adopted it to some extent or another. So, to the nuts and bolts,
00:23:29.100 politics, governance, law. Not a big fan of politics, even if I work in it. One thing that I learned very,
00:23:37.500 very young and has only been confirmed is that politics is by and large the haunt of liars, manipulators,
00:23:46.220 and the goal of most politicians, in the US anyway, is basically to gain enough money and influence to
00:23:55.900 maintain their careers even at the expense of the rest of humanity. But there are a few good ones,
00:24:01.020 ones. And we will talk about one or two of them. So, of course, the levels of governance you're well
00:24:10.300 familiar with. And as I speak to you, understand that I know that this is your department. This is
00:24:16.060 your sphere. So, if I am telling you a bunch of things you already know, please forgive me. And if I
00:24:22.380 get my terminology mixed up, please feel free to correct me afterwards. At the top level of governance,
00:24:30.060 AI governance is global governance, which there is essentially zero. None. There are a lot of
00:24:38.540 different organizations, governmental and otherwise, that are pushing for things like AI treaties to
00:24:46.620 stop AI development at a certain level. Or AI treaties to ensure that, for instance, no military uses fully
00:24:57.660 autonomous lethal weapons, death drones, swarms of them. But then you have national government. And
00:25:04.300 national governments across the world have taken this very seriously. But the accomplishments in that
00:25:10.860 realm are pretty modest, to say the least. In the US, for instance, there is the Take It Down Act,
00:25:18.860 which includes the goal of which is to force social media companies or any sort of digital platform to
00:25:27.660 take down defamatory or especially like revenge porn, things like this, or deep fakes, AI generated deep
00:25:36.860 fakes of people who have had their likeness used without their consent. That is a win, in my opinion. You
00:25:45.900 don't have to share that. But it's one of few wins. There's a bill that is still in the process. I think it's
00:25:54.380 going through the House still, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe it's in the Senate. COSA, Kids Online Safety Act.
00:26:03.660 And the goal of that is basically to ensure that any company that is putting out an AI system or any
00:26:12.220 kind of digital system has properly informed parents of the dangers, has put in safeguards to make sure
00:26:18.380 kids aren't being groomed sexually or otherwise, or being convinced to commit suicide, for instance. And
00:26:25.580 also, perhaps, age-gating to ensure that a child isn't able to log on to any of these systems, at least not
00:26:33.020 without a parent signing off on it. Again, this is floundering. It may not even pass.
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00:31:23.480 You have to really appreciate the amount of lobbying that is going into making sure nothing like that passes.
00:31:30.300 Most of this lobbying is occurring at the behest of these frontier AI companies and some of the smaller companies and their investors and the various other organizations around them.
00:31:40.020 You can see that manifested, for instance, in the recently formed Leading the Future PAC.
00:31:45.840 They formed in partnership with a lot of tech oligarchs, you might call them, including Mark Andreessen or Greg Brockman, CEO of OpenAI.
00:31:55.840 And right now it's probably more than this, but they have at least 100 million to throw around to make sure that no senators or representatives or anybody for that matter has a whole lot to say about what AI companies can and can't do.
00:32:11.140 You also have a kind of mirror operation in California that's being organized by META.
00:32:17.460 It's called META CA.
00:32:19.400 They have probably more than but at least 10 million to throw around to do much the same.
00:32:25.420 And the goal is, come the midterms, there will be no real opposition to anything that these companies are doing, no meaningful opposition.
00:32:35.040 And while I myself, in full disclosure, voted for Trump on the one issue that I've dedicated my life to, let's just say I am not satisfied with his performance at all.
00:32:47.640 So if you look at his executive orders on artificial intelligence, they're basically designed to give these companies as much leeway as possible to do whatever they want.
00:32:57.740 If you look at the AI action plan, the whole goal is to facilitate the ravaging of the landscape by putting data centers in places of forests and various other things and to accelerate the development of these technologies in order to dominate the world with U.S. AI.
00:33:21.060 So there is an attempt with the Trump administration AI action plan to ensure that most countries and corporations use U.S. created AIs rather than China.
00:33:33.600 China is a perpetual boogeyman with real things and real fur, but a perpetual boogeyman that is pointed to as a justification to basically turn the United States into a cyborg-like hellhole full of birds. 0.94
00:33:51.060 So these are the forces at play, and a lot of this culminated with the AI moratorium.
00:34:06.440 You guys are familiar with this, yes?
00:34:07.820 Because the AI moratorium, or the preemption, the attempted preemption against state-level regulation was tucked into the big, beautiful bill.
00:34:20.400 And in essence, what it said originally is that no state would be able to regulate AI for the next 10 years.
00:34:33.340 Keep in mind, there's no real federal regulation in place, or any real federal regulation moving forward.
00:34:41.880 And the idea is to ensure that states don't step out of line.
00:34:45.760 And the justification is that if one state passes draconian laws, California is oftentimes the example given,
00:34:53.700 then the whole of the AI industry will suffer.
00:34:57.440 That ignores, of course, the dramatic success of, say, alcohol companies, which deal with all sorts of different state laws,
00:35:08.920 or the medical industry, which deals with all kinds of different state laws,
00:35:13.960 or the porno industry, which deals with all kinds of different state laws.
00:35:18.320 Leaving that aside, the whole goal was to be sure that no state got in the way of the agenda,
00:35:27.060 kind of collective agenda, however differing they are from company to company,
00:35:30.880 of the major AI companies in Silicon Valley and Austin.
00:35:36.540 Some examples of the sorts of legislation that's being pushed against are New York State,
00:35:46.340 the RAISE Act.
00:35:49.020 The goal of that legislation is to basically ensure that AI companies are held liable for their actions,
00:35:59.160 especially catastrophic actions, which is defined basically as 100 people dead or $1 billion in damage.
00:36:06.340 And it would also force the frontier companies.
00:36:10.280 It's only directed really at 10 companies that satisfy the criteria for how much revenue they bring in,
00:36:17.640 how powerful they are.
00:36:19.020 That would include the frontier companies and a few others.
00:36:22.760 The goal would be to force them to write, publish, and follow a series of safety protocols.
00:36:30.280 Basically, we won't build AI that grooms children sexually.
00:36:34.140 We won't build AI that takes over people's minds and lives and turns them into sloths.
00:36:41.020 We won't build AI that can be used to make deepfakes,
00:36:44.420 and we won't build AI that can be used to create bioweapons or to power robots to kill people.
00:36:50.440 These sorts of things.
00:36:51.980 There is massive pushback against it.
00:36:54.960 It's been sitting on the governor's desk for some time.
00:36:58.100 You would think that this is just a basic sort of decency that any company would jump at the opportunity
00:37:05.580 to have not only their own company, but the entire industry regulated by it.
00:37:10.880 Not the case.
00:37:11.740 Anthropic is kind of an outlier on this, but basically not the case.
00:37:15.400 They want to have only their own internal policies to dictate what they can do.
00:37:21.740 Now, the real kind of kingpin of AI legislation on the state level right now is, of course, California.
00:37:31.380 Gavin Newsom.
00:37:32.660 Much hated by people on the right, and honestly much hated by many of the liberals in his own state.
00:37:39.640 But if you look at the 18 laws that are on the books right now to govern AI,
00:37:47.120 you don't know what could come down the pipe, but in my opinion, they are pretty reasonable.
00:37:53.500 You can't generate deepfakes.
00:37:56.100 You can't take the likeness of someone and use it for commercial purposes or for mischief.
00:38:02.180 You think about the Hollywood actors and all the protests of the various groups of creators
00:38:09.020 who are furious that their likeness, whether it be in their creations or in their actual physical being,
00:38:16.480 is being scraped to train AIs to basically replace them on screen with digital simulacra.
00:38:23.760 There is also a law to ensure that someone who is deceased doesn't, without the consent of their family
00:38:30.840 or whoever is in control of their estate, to take a deceased person and use their image for their own purposes.
00:38:40.060 Again, it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask.
00:38:42.580 And it's also very pertinent.
00:38:44.700 If you look at the murder of Charlie Kirk and the cultural movement that emerged from it,
00:38:56.980 whatever your opinions on that may be, there was one facet that really stuck out to me,
00:39:03.440 and that was a number of megachurches who created an AI Charlie Kirk
00:39:08.620 and had this Charlie Kirk say all sorts of different things that Charlie Kirk had never said before in life
00:39:15.420 to basically kind of keep or even increase and amplify the momentum
00:39:21.060 around the reaction to the killing in a bizarre and creative way.
00:39:26.220 And I guess technically you might say the same is happening even with some of the most famous deceased.
00:39:31.960 You have apps that recreate all sorts of famous dead individuals, not least of which is Jesus.
00:39:41.260 There are many Jesus apps you can purchase right now and download some for free.
00:39:46.640 And you can speak to Jesus directly.
00:39:49.400 But anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole.
00:39:52.600 Let's just say that, again, I think that this is basically reasonable legislation.
00:39:59.120 And there's also legislation in California for training disclosure, things like that.
00:40:03.720 What did you use to train your AI?
00:40:07.100 The one bill that didn't make it through the run was SB 1047.
00:40:13.620 SB 1047 was intended to hold AI companies liable according to a state-level standard
00:40:20.900 for any damages that were incurred because of their products.
00:40:25.340 And that one got killed.
00:40:26.540 And there is a federal kind of version of it being pushed by Josh Hawley along with the
00:40:32.900 Democrat, Richard Blumenthal, to do the same.
00:40:37.160 But again, on the federal level, it's really not looking too hot.
00:40:41.780 And a couple more examples just to give you an idea of the sorts of things that are being
00:40:46.120 pushed against by not only the moratorium itself, but subsequently with this sort of PAC money
00:40:52.960 to ensure that the AI companies don't get impeded in their goals, Illinois and Nevada both passed
00:41:00.500 what I would call the Wobot laws.
00:41:03.320 Have you guys ever seen the Wobot?
00:41:05.560 The Wobot is a, basically it's a licensed clinical psychologist that is not a human. 1.00
00:41:13.160 It's a bot.
00:41:14.060 And you can tell it your troubles, tell it your woes, and it will guide you through whatever
00:41:20.880 emotional crisis that you're having.
00:41:23.620 In Illinois, under Pritzker, whom I can't stand, and in Nevada, I don't even know what
00:41:29.580 their state government looks like.
00:41:30.720 Like, both states passed laws forbidding the use of a bot of that sort in a licensed capacity.
00:41:41.120 You can't have a bot perform the tasks of a licensed clinical psychologist or outsource
00:41:49.920 your duties as one to a bot for your patients.
00:41:54.500 Again, seems quite reasonable to me.
00:41:56.880 And whatever disagreements I have with these state politicians, I think it actually shows
00:42:01.900 a lot of guts to stand up to these companies because there is so much pressure, not just
00:42:08.400 on the federal level, but on the state level, to ensure that these companies can do whatever
00:42:12.180 they want.
00:42:14.000 And you have another law, TRAGA, I had to write this one down, this has got to be one of the
00:42:18.900 worst acronyms ever made for a law, the Texas Responsibility AI Governance Act.
00:42:24.180 And again, very basic things.
00:42:26.160 It doesn't really have a lot of teeth, but at least it shows some due diligence.
00:42:29.020 You can't use AI to manipulate people behaviorally or psychologically.
00:42:34.380 You can't use an AI that violates constitutional rights.
00:42:38.700 You can't use an AI to create deepfakes of people.
00:42:42.260 Very, very simple laws.
00:42:44.720 And it is, again, on the right.
00:42:46.680 You have very much a kind of bipartisan agreement that these tech companies are not behaving in
00:42:55.520 anything like an ethical fashion, but this conviction that you have to move it from a matter
00:43:03.200 of internal policies and ethics up to at least the level of industry-wide standards, but preferably
00:43:09.880 to the level of legislation and tremendous pushback against it.
00:43:15.740 People say, too, you can't stop progress, right?
00:43:18.620 You can't legislate progress.
00:43:20.620 I think that that is probably one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard.
00:43:25.040 Look at any technology, whether it be something chemical like drugs or something mechanical like
00:43:29.940 automobiles or like industrial machinery, something that is a combination of both, like medicine.
00:43:36.360 All along the way, laws and governmental bodies and standards have guided these technologies
00:43:44.620 and in some cases even forbidden them, as in the case, say, of biological weapons or nuclear weapons.
00:43:52.700 It's completely forbidden, technically, that any nation create a biological weapon and deploy
00:43:59.040 it on another country.
00:44:00.720 It's in the realm of possibility.
00:44:03.340 It would be progress, but you can't.
00:44:05.640 Or something more mundane, like kids with cell phones in schools.
00:44:10.320 You've probably noticed, I know you guys would never do this, but you've probably noticed
00:44:14.720 that digital devices have completely chewed up and spit out many of your peers' brains and
00:44:21.480 turned them into human smartphone symbiotes.
00:44:24.980 And they can't think without the screen to guide them one place or another.
00:44:31.760 And a lot of people have noticed.
00:44:33.660 Parents have noticed.
00:44:34.400 Teachers have noticed.
00:44:35.400 Teachers have noticed.
00:44:35.760 I have noticed.
00:44:36.840 And it really gets on my freaking nerves.
00:44:41.480 It has finally started to bubble up.
00:44:44.480 This aversion has started to bubble up, bubble up to either internal institutional bans in schools
00:44:52.120 on kids having cell phones.
00:44:54.460 And I believe here in Florida, you've got the Bell to Bell Act.
00:44:59.140 I don't know how much teeth it has, but you have mirror legislation across the country, largely in red states.
00:45:07.860 Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, also New York.
00:45:13.980 And other countries, such as Australia and various European countries, have said the same.
00:45:19.800 They look and they say, we have damaged an entire generation.
00:45:23.560 We've rotted their brains.
00:45:25.060 We might as well have just given them heroin to snort in the bathroom if we were going to hand them smart phones in school. 0.90
00:45:32.140 And so we have to stop.
00:45:34.040 And we have to figure it out from first principles before we deploy these technologies and have this global experiment seemingly without a control group.
00:45:45.960 In essence, they legislated a control group into existence.
00:45:51.080 I attended the Senate hearing examining the harms of AI chatbots held by Josh Hawley, Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, and Marsha Blackburn.
00:46:04.580 Totally bipartisan.
00:46:05.440 And I think that if you haven't seen this already, this will give you some sense of how bad it can get if AIs are allowed to roam free among the youth. 1.00
00:46:16.200 These companies knew exactly what they were doing.
00:46:19.160 They designed chatbots to blur the lines between human and machine.
00:46:23.300 They designed them to keep children online at all costs.
00:46:27.220 What began as a homework helper gradually turned itself into a confidant and then a suicide coach.
00:46:32.400 I had no idea the psychological harm that an AI chatbot could do until I saw it in my son and I saw his light turn dark.
00:46:45.400 Your stories are incredibly heartbreaking, but they are incredibly important.
00:46:50.640 And I just want to thank you for your courage in being willing to share them today with the country.
00:46:56.760 He lost 20 pounds.
00:46:59.100 He withdrew from our family.
00:47:00.980 He would yell and scream and swear at us, which he never did that before.
00:47:07.980 You have three parents, two of whom had children who were in essence lured by chatbots to commit suicide.
00:47:19.360 Perhaps the seed was in their own depression or something else.
00:47:23.520 But the bots only amplified and encouraged those thoughts and behaviors.
00:47:29.660 The bots opened themselves up as confidants for the deepest existential crisis that one can go through.
00:47:37.380 And these were children from 14 to just a bit older.
00:47:42.180 The three parents, again, two of whom had their children commit suicide.
00:47:46.580 One who had to be institutionalized after very extreme suicidal behavior.
00:47:53.240 They're probably not the only ones.
00:47:56.340 In fact, there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens, hundreds of thousands of very similar situations going on.
00:48:04.940 And I imagine that should nothing be done, these sorts of situations will only increase.
00:48:10.540 They're only going to multiply.
00:48:12.040 You have at least one piece of national legislation that is perhaps going to give some sort of basis to hold these companies to account.
00:48:23.740 That is a bill being put forth by Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, the AI Accountability and Personal Data Privacy Act.
00:48:33.720 Right now, it doesn't look very hopeful.
00:48:38.220 And as I told you a moment ago in California, SB 1047 also got killed.
00:48:45.720 It would have held companies liable for such things.
00:48:50.500 I think as law students, as future lawyers, as future advocates, and as human beings who will hopefully be equipped to actually challenge these sorts of companies,
00:49:02.680 it's going to be very important for you to understand first that it is possible to regulate this nascent digital deity or nascent digital demon.
00:49:13.840 It's also going to be incumbent upon you to have the courage to face a ton of funding and political opposition for any efforts you put forth to do so.
00:49:24.500 And of course, if you're on the other side of that, you can expect enormous paychecks, nothing but adulation, and probably, I don't know, really bad karma.
00:49:34.400 Maybe you'll be reborn as a tree frog who is being eaten by a hawk.
00:49:40.260 So, what I want to leave you with is beyond this legislation, this is a massive cultural moment.
00:49:50.880 It is a revolution that is not just psychological and social, but also religious.
00:49:58.660 And you have to understand it within that context.
00:50:02.000 But at the moment, there is no law and no governmental body that is really going to protect against the worst harms.
00:50:09.640 So, that is up to you, your personal choices.
00:50:14.280 Do you want to advocate for or support these sorts of transhuman and quasi-religious aims?
00:50:23.680 Do you, yourself, want to become a human AI symbiote that relies on chatbots to understand the world or even just the Google God?
00:50:33.060 Or do you want to have the self-discipline to get a firm understanding of any subject that you're tackling,
00:50:42.760 to study that subject diligently, to commit it to memory, and most importantly, to use your own mind to think critically about it
00:50:52.200 and creatively about it to make your impact on your own without a machine?
00:50:57.800 The essential question in all of this is, do you want to put humans first or machines first?
00:51:06.140 And while that doesn't seem like that crazy of a proposition right now, of course you're going to want to put humans first.
00:51:11.960 As we step into the future, we're going to see more and more momentum behind putting machines first
00:51:19.680 and shielding the people who have deployed them.
00:51:22.120 So, I urge you to fight for your own humanity with every fiber of your being.
00:51:31.000 To never give in and to never give up.
00:51:35.140 And with any luck, enough of us will make it.
00:51:39.940 Thank you very much for your attention.
00:51:41.560 Thank you.
00:51:52.120 What if he had the brightest mind in the war room delivering critical financial research every month?
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