Discussing artificial intelligence, President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks and Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi warned that the sheer scale of “woke AI” poses a significant risk to free speech.
Sacks, speaking on “The Ben & Marc Show” on Monday, warned that “the biggest risk of AI” is “not The Terminator. It’s 1984” — that is, it’s how AI turbo-charges an Orwellian revision of history. AI could “censor us,” Sacks predicted. Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi chimed in to agree in an X post, stating that people do not sufficiently understand the international scope of censorship efforts, including “the use of ‘content moderation’ to re-shape the public’s understanding” of both current politics and historical events.
On the podcast, Sacks said, “I almost feel like the term ‘woke AI’ is insufficient to explain what's going on because it somehow trivializes it. I mean, what we're really talking about is Orwellian AI. You know, we're talking about AI that, that lies to you, that — that distorts an answer, that rewrites history in real time to serve a current political agenda of the people who are in power.”
He is more optimistic about the trajectory of AI regulation now that Trump is in office, reversing the dystopian approach of the Biden administration. But such wokeness as the Google AI chatbot infamously displayed — generating historically inaccurate images of popes and American Founders to be more “diverse” — was “not an accident,” Sacks clarified.
And as AI becomes the “main way that we interact and get our information online,” Sacks cautioned, “it'll be used by the people in power to control the information we receive, that it'll contain ideological bias … it'll censor us.”
Social media censorship was the practice run.
“All that trust and safety apparatus that was created for social media,” noted Sacks, will be transferred “over to this new world of AI, and then on top of that you've got the surveillance issues where, you know, AI is going to know everything about you,” he continued.
The greatest risk is that AI will become “the perfect tool for the government to monitor and control you,” and therefore, “that's the thing we should be working towards preventing. And the problem is a lot of these regulations that are being whipped up by these fearmongering techniques, they're actually empowering the government to — to engage in this type of control that I think we should all be very afraid of actually,” Sacks ended.
In response to Sacks, Taibbi posted on X, “One of my regrets about the Twitter Files is that I think we failed to convey the scale of the ideas being envisaged, like common international databases of speech offenders or the use of ‘content moderation’ to re-shape the public’s understanding not just of news, but history.”
Indeed, multiple examples of AI rewriting history or erasing news have already occurred. MRC exposed Chinese AI DeepSeek in June for producing biased answers or rewriting answers in real time regarding the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan as a sovereign nation, pro-freedom Hong Kong political figure Jimmy Lai and the plight of the Uyghur Muslims. In September 2024, MRC found that Google blocked its advanced AI chatbot Gemini from replying to a prompt about the second assassination attempt on then-nominee Donald Trump.
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