(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / Washington, 11.11.2023).- President Biden unveiled sweeping plans for domestic and international regulation of artificial intelligence that will consign conservatives to virtual gulags.
The executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence”, signed by President Biden last week, sets out in detail how federal agencies are to use and regulate artificial intelligence (AI), including promoting global standards to moderate online content.
The new tools to silence and cancel conservatives are being created under the rubric of providing “safeguards” against discrimination, bias, and disinformation and promoting “rights-affirming” approaches in digital technologies.
“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risks, we need to govern this technology… — there’s no other way around it — It must be governed,” President Biden said at the signing ceremony last week.
“Intelligence systems deployed irresponsibly have reproduced and intensified existing inequalities, caused new types of harmful discrimination, and exacerbated online and physical harms,” the executive order reads. It calls for “rigorous regulation” within the United States to hold tech companies and developers accountable. “Only then can Americans trust AI to advance civil rights, civil liberties, equity, and justice for all.”
The executive order also directs the U.S. Secretary of State and other federal agencies to engage foreign nations and international bodies to export these same standards in order to create “strong international frameworks for managing the risks and harnessing the benefits of AI.”
The executive order provides backing to the already existing whole-of-government censorship regime that was brought to light in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. The Twitter Files, in particular, revealed a complex public-private social control apparatus to coordinate messaging and censorship between the federal and state governments, private industry, as well as traditional and new media. It covers all issues, including health, climate, and elections. Much of it is automated through algorithms. All of it is carried out under the banner of pursuing legitimate aims, including combatting “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
The executive order calls for the development of international “voluntary standards” for tech companies to curb discrimination, bias, and disinformation modelled on the ones developed by the Biden administration behind closed doors with tech companies in the United States. This directive will play directly into ongoing UN negotiations for the development of a Global Digital Compact, previously covered by the Friday Fax. The Biden administration is behind several initiatives to make censorship of conservatives a permanent feature of AI design and development through the international agreement expected next year.
Both Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris emphasized how the Biden administration has been working to develop AI safety standards to eliminate discrimination for some time.
Biden’s latest executive order builds on previous Obama-Biden policies. An executive order on “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” signed by Biden earlier this year, ordered all federal agencies to ensure their use of artificial intelligence complies with Biden polices “prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics across Federal programs.”
In 2021, the Biden administration released “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”, which outlines how tech companies have an obligation to prevent “algorithmic discrimination.” Similarly, earlier this year, the administration oversaw the publication of a manual on “Artificial Intelligence Management Framework”, which describes how discrimination and other impacts of AI should be measured at a technical level. An Obama administration white paper on big data, algorithms and their implications for civil rights in 2016 was the first to suggest this possibility.
