Politics Don’t Allow Hollywood to Write the Rules of AI Unleashing American innovation can break Big Media and Big Entertainment’s megaphone. (By Maks Ershov/Shutterstock) The debate on American AI can be reduced to a single question: regulate, or accelerate? On this question, President Donald Trump has taken a clear position: accelerate.  In late July, the President launched his AI action plan. Packaged with three accompanying executive orders, the plan’s first order of business is to “remove red tape and onerous regulation,” including the overturning of the Biden administration’s executive order on AI, which emphasized harm-prevention, guardrails, and government capacity-building.  One very specific “guardrail” that the Trump administration has demolished is “woke AI”—AI that is trained to avoid the truth in favor of politically correct shibboleths. A whole academic field, called “machine-learning fairness,” has appeared in recent decades, aimed at preventing AI from becoming too truthful. One of the three AI executive orders takes aim at this trend, preventing the federal government from promoting AI that is not truth-seeking and ideological neutral. Trump clearly wants an across-the-board push for American AI dominance. It instructs the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to seek information from businesses and the public about the most restrictive regulations hindering AI development, with a view to eliminate them. This is a massive shift from the tip-toe, harm-reduction, decelerationist approach of the previous administration.  National security is a key factor behind the shift in policy, as revealed by the action plan’s very first line: The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits. Just like we won the space race, it is imperative that the United States and its allies win this race. There’s a reason why microchips are subject to U.S. export controls specifically targeted at China. Whichever nation wins the AI race is likely to develop an insurmountable advantage in both commercial and military technology. Should China win, the U.S. could be reduced to second-power status for generations.  “Artificial intelligence is coming no matter what and it is vital that the biggest and best AI is American AI,” says former top DOGE lawyer and AI policy expert James Burnham. “We cannot afford to lose this race to China or any other global competitor. As President Trump has made clear, the United States has to be number one forever.” On its own, beating China is a good enough reason to unleash the full potential of American AI.  But there’s another reason for AI accelerationism, not so closely tied to national security, that is worth considering.  If you get your opinions from social media hype, you might think that the chief opponents of the AI industry are those who believe it will turn into Skynet and kill us all. But the most dogged opponents of AI are not the doomers on X, but a more familiar force: Big Hollywood.  AI poses an existential threat to the entertainment industry in the same way that social media posed an existential threat to legacy media. While AI is not quite at the level where it can produce full-blown feature movies, it can already mimic the voice of popular singers, create special effects, and edit images and video. As the technology develops, the cost of producing entertainment products will plummet, putting power in the hands of independent creators. An example: A YouTube creator recently went viral for re-creating a $1 million dollar scene from Star Wars for $100. Most of his work was done manually, through editing software. But it’s only a matter of time before similar work can be accomplished primarily or even wholly through AI prompts.  No wonder Hollywood is terrified.  And no wonder that the most pivotal AI lawsuit right now is Disney and NBCUniversal’s case against Midjourney, an image-generating AI platform. Universal Pictures is also spoiling for a lawsuit. What these companies want—and what the Trump administration, at least so far, seems likely to deny them—is a cut of the AI industry’s revenues.  We should expect the battle to evolve similarly to the fight over the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). That was the legacy media’s attempt to get Washington, DC to bail them out in the face of unstoppable competition from social media platforms – it would have forced the latter to give Big Media a stream of ad revenue for simply linking to their content.  Coverage from Breitbart News and some deft legislative maneuvering from House Republicans somehow killed the bill in 2022, despite Democrat majorities in both chambers. The legacy media’s last stand failed, and they are well on their way to a thoroughly deserved period of obsolescence.  Hollywood (and Big Entertainment more generally) deserves a period of obsolescence too, for similar reasons to their pals in the legacy media. They’re hopelessly politically biased, and their increasingly stale product (can’t wait for the 122nd reboot of a superhero franchise!) has lost its ability to compel the American public. Dominated by unions and insiders, few industries need competition more.  I have spent most of my career calling out Big Tech—mostly for its pernicious political censorship, which still has not ended. But one thing they shouldn’t be called out for is their disruption of industries that richly need a little creative destruction—first the media, now Hollywood—and, downstream of that, their disruption of legacy political elites who rely on both Big Media and Big Hollywood to influence the minds of the masses.  When it comes to media, whether it’s news or entertainment, Big Tech should be allowed to do what it does best: move fast and break things. The post Don’t Allow Hollywood to Write the Rules of AI appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Russian Air Incursions Are a Warning to Europe The Europeans must come back to earth when it comes to “reassurance forces” in Ukraine. The Russian fighters that briefly entered Estonian airspace last Friday and the drones that flew into Polish and Romanian airspace earlier are very unlikely to have been an accident, but they were not an “attack.” The drones were unarmed decoys, nobody was hurt, and the only damage was done when one was shot down by Polish air defenses.  They may have been intended as a test of those defenses; they were almost certainly intended as a warning—a warning above all against British and European plans to deploy a “reassurance force” to Ukraine after a peace settlement. This has been repeatedly and categorically rejected by the Russian government, but continues to be urged by some European governments with a blind determination that suggests that, rather than making a contribution to peace, they are actually interested in blocking any viable peace settlement. As for the Russian fighters that entered Estonian airspace on September 19, Western media reporting has given the impression that they flew over Estonia itself. They did not. They deviated by a maximum of about five miles from their internationally recognized route over the sea along the middle of the Gulf of Finland. They continued flying parallel to that route but close to it for about 12 minutes before reentering it. This has not stopped wilder elements in the West from suggesting that the next time this happens NATO should shoot them down. In normal circumstances, or between countries with normal relations, this “incident” would hardly even be worth reporting. The planes were on their way from St. Petersburg to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Amid all the resulting NATO anxiety, it would be nice if someone reflected that it might have been a good idea for NATO to think about the risks of this before extending membership to the Baltic States and isolating Kaliningrad from Russia. (Relatedly, it is essential that NATO countries think about the risk of Russian military retaliation before deciding to intercept ships from Russia’s shadow fleet in international waters, for this would in effect blockade Russian trade from the Baltic and cut off Kaliningrad by sea—something that under international law constitutes an act of war, and to which Russia would almost certainly respond with armed force.) Concerning the plan for a European “reassurance force” for postwar Ukraine, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb told the Guardian this weekend that future security guarantees to Kiev by a European “coalition of the willing” would compel participating countries to fight Russia if Russia attacked Ukraine again, for “that is the idea of security guarantees by definition.” He added that “security guarantees in essence are a deterrent. That deterrent has to be plausible and in order for it to be plausible it has to be strong.” Stubb echoed the British prime minister Keir Starmer and other leaders in saying that for this, guaranteed U.S. support would be essential. It is to be presumed that, when making this statement, Stubb was in possession of the following facts: Every major NATO government, including the former Biden administration, publicly and repeatedly ruled out going to war with Russia over Ukraine; the “commitments” made by European countries to the proposed “reassurance force”—including those of Finland—have been of the vaguest kind; not merely have Germany, Poland and other countries categorically and repeatedly ruled out contributing troops, but even the British government is now thinking only in terms of a contribution in the air and at sea; European publics are deeply divided on the issue; Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has stated that any European troops in Ukraine would be considered “legitimate targets”; per Stubb himself, American backing is both essential and uncertain, as the extent of Trump’s readiness to back such a force remains highly unclear; and, finally, such a European force and American backing for it would have to be for the indefinite future, even while the future of the Transatlantic Alliance itself is in question. All this being so, one might logically assume that Stubb’s unstated goal in this interview must have been to get his fellow leaders to abandon the idea of a reassurance force. Yet this may be too charitable an assessment of Stubb’s capacity for logic; for he went on to add that “Russia has absolutely no say in the sovereign decisions of an independent nation state … So for me it’s not an issue will Russia agree [to the reassurance force] or not. Of course they won’t, but that’s not the point.” I have heard this statement parroted by officials in Brussels and a range of western European capitals; and if they actually believe it, there is reason to doubt not just their honesty but their sanity. A war resulting in more than 100,000 Ukrainian dead tells us that Russia does indeed have a say in Ukraine’s decisions, if Moscow considers them threats to Russian security. Do the people who say this really think that the U.S. “has no say” in the security decisions of Central American countries, or can be persuaded not to exert that say by respect for their “sovereign decisions”? Is that what the history of the past century and more tells us?  Instead of trying to trap the U.S. into a commitment to Ukraine involving the permanent risk of war with Russia—with all the long-term dangers and costs to the U.S. that would follow—European governments should be steadily and sensibly building up the defenses of NATO within its existing borders while at the same time developing a viable peace settlement by which Russia would abandon its impossible demands to Ukraine in return for a new European security architecture guaranteeing Russia’s own legitimate security interests. Of such European thinking, however, there is at present very little sign. The post The Russian Air Incursions Are a Warning to Europe appeared first on The American Conservative.

They stopped a legend. The post ‘Fire’: the legendary song ‘Hey Jude’ kept off the number-one spot first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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