Donald Trump says he’s already used artificial intelligence to redraft one of his speeches, praising the technology’s ability to produce “beautiful writing”—while also acknowledging it might lead to armageddon.
Speaking on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast Thursday, the presumptive GOP nominee said he thinks the world needs to be “very careful” with AI, which he called “really powerful stuff.” “It can also be really used for good,” Trump said, adding: “I had a speech rewritten by AI.”
Trump didn’t name who had helped him use the technology other than describing them as “one of the top people.” “He goes click click click,” Trump said, “And like 15 seconds later he shows me my speech, written so beautifully I said: I’m gonna use this sucker!”
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It’s not clear which speech Trump was referring to or if he did, in fact, publicly deliver the machine-made text. But he seemed extremely enthusiastic about the results, saying he’d “never seen anything like it.”
Asked what he said to his speechwriter after the experiment, Trump was presumably referring to speechwriter Vince Haley when he joked: “I said: You’re fired, Vince!” “This was so crazy,” he continued. “It took [my speech] and it made it unbelievable, and so fast.”
“It comes out with the most beautiful writing,” Trump said. “So one industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters. I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly. In a matter of literally minutes it’s done. So it’s a little bit scary.”
Earlier in the interview, Trump also spoke about deepfakes, saying he’d seen one of him “promoting a product” which he “could not tell” wasn’t real. “The voice was perfect,” Trump said. “The lips moved perfectly with every word. If you were a lip reader you’d say, ‘It’s absolutely perfect.’”
The high-quality fakes are “scary in particular” if “you’re the president of the United States,” he said, sketching out a potential doomsday scenario in which a deepfake of the commander-in-chief announces a nuclear strike on another country.
“I asked Elon [Musk], ‘Is there any way that, like, Russia or China can say that that’s not really President Trump?’” Trump said. “He said: ‘There’s no way.’” He speculated that a country that believed it was really being targeted could respond with “maybe a counterattack” agains the U.S. “It’s so dangerous in that way,” he added.
