The sudden rightward shift of Silicon Valley's executive ranks has been swift and mysterious, but the key to solving the mystery may now lie in a cheeky blog post penned by a regulator at the Federal Trade Commission.Recommendations from federal regulators telling companies to comply with the law aren't usually known for being funny, but Michael Attleson, a lawyer in the commission's advertising division, made waves this month with a public memo warning tech companies to stop falsely advertising chatbots.
“Therapy bots are not licensed psychologists, AI girlfriends are not girls or friends, grief bots have no souls, and AI co-pilots are not God,” Attleson wrote in a post titled “Help Happens Every Minute.” Federal regulators have likened so-called “artificial intelligence” to a Magic 8 Ball, criticizing tech marketers for “likening their products to magic (they're not)” and “talking about their products having feelings (they don't).” When asked if companies could expect to promote chatbots “in a way that doesn't merit the FTC's attention,” Attleson joked that the Magic 8 Ball responded, “The outlook is not good.”
Will Oremus of the Washington Post wrote on Blue Sky that “the FTC has written more outrageous things about AI quack medicine than any other organization.” It was both amusing and reassuring to see someone dismiss the hype and remind everyone that AI is not “intelligent.” It turns out Attleson has a long list of pun-heavy pieces threatening companies that misuse AI to steal, mislead, or defraud. It's fun, but it's also a compelling indicator of why tech billionaires are flocking to Donald Trump's campaign to fund and support him.
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The technology industry is becoming increasingly riddled with fraud. True innovation has slowed dramatically in recent years, threatening to shrink the phenomenal gains of the early part of this century. To supplement their incomes, tech industry leaders have increasingly turned to overhyped products or outright fraud, as evidenced by the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the imprisonment of its founder. President Joe Biden's administration has made eradicating consumer fraud a top priority. Rather than refraining from shady practices, the tech industry is looking to Donald Trump, who has built a business career on fraud, for help.
It's alarming how many tech leaders are pushing to end President Joe Biden's term in office.
The liberalism of the tech investor class has always been overrated. It's true that the industry as a whole leans toward Democrats, but that's more from workers than from management. Still, it's striking how many tech leaders have stepped up to end Joe Biden's presidency. As Theodore Schleifer reported in The New York Times, Trump, who once shunned Silicon Valley, now frequently interacts with its elite. This month, Trump visited San Francisco for the first time since before he ran for president, for a $12 million fundraiser. The Winklevoss twins, of Facebook notoriety, are now big crypto celebrities and donated $2 million in Bitcoin to Trump as part of a publicity stunt.
Until now, perhaps in a pathetic attempt to appear as though they were still “liberal,” many of the same people supported the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccination zealot whose many Trump supporters hoped would use his famous name to steal votes from Biden. Kennedy is deeply connected to Silicon Valley, and his running mate, tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan, is the ex-wife of a Google executive and a close friend of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. But as polls begin to show that Kennedy may be stealing as much support from Trump as Biden, Silicon Valley's enthusiasm for anti-vaccination activists is waning. They are moving to directly support Trump.
Direct funding is just the tip of the iceberg. Tech industry bigwigs are also steering the entire media landscape in a pro-Trump direction. Musk famously bought Twitter, now named X, and has steadily transformed it into a dumping ground for nasty right-wing propaganda of a decidedly neo-Nazi nature. Musk himself constantly posts provocative “Just Ask”-style tweets about race and intelligence. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promised the Washington Post “won't change its values” when he bought it in 2013, but he has recently made a series of controversial appointments to the management team, hiring several people with experience working under right-wing propagandist Rupert Murdoch. Newly hired publisher and editors Will Lewis and Robert Winnett were soon exposed for their ties to the criminal phone-tapping scandal that rocked British publishing a few years ago. Winnett resigned before joining the Post.
Bezos' decision is being interpreted as just a business move. But the Washington Post can make money without covering vulgar people. (The New York Times does it with its gaming and food articles.) So let's point out that the Biden administration sued Bezos and sued Amazon for an illegal monopoly. It's this monopoly that turned Amazon's once-great product search engine into a wilderness of junk. It's impossible to search for anything, from socks to computers, without being overwhelmed by inferior knock-offs. But it's hard to buy things elsewhere because Amazon has driven competitors out of business.
It's a process we see time and time again. Technology companies that once made really good and useful products have become increasingly useless, overwhelmed by spam, fraudulent gimmicks, and efforts to squeeze a few extra cents out of consumers without producing value for money. Google search is a wilderness of ads and AI-generated “answers” that barely answer any questions. Social media is full of phony salesmen. Instead of the next cool product that will improve everyone's lives, we first got cryptocurrency, which was at best a tulip trade and in many cases outright theft as FTX showed. Then, that NFTs, which were made to look like a simple way to screenshot images from the internet, might be more valuable than diamonds and gold. And now we have “artificial intelligence,” the falsely taught belief that we can replace human intelligence with machines that mimic language but don't actually have a mind of their own.
Biden's fight against corporate fraud, such as forcing airlines to refund cancelled flights, is so contrived and boring that it rarely gets the attention it deserves, except for the occasional funny blog post. This week, for example, Biden's FTC sued Adobe for making it impossible to cancel subscriptions. But as Schleifer points out, Silicon Valley's private jet class has certainly taken notice. Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan has “risen to Darth Vader-like status in some parts of the tech industry,” Schleifer reports. The mean bears of the Biden administration don't seem to like the idea of telling lonely men that their computer screens can replace their girlfriends. They rightly see through it as a lie, just like the fake cancer cures and get-rich-quick schemes that have been used to scam so many people before.
However, Trump will never stand between the con artists and their victims.
Project 2025, which serves as the policy arm of the Trump campaign, pledges to clean up federal agencies and replace competent bureaucrats with Trump stooges. When it comes to agencies like the FTC, the plan is often dismissed in the press as “business-friendly,” but that's a misnomer: it's scam-friendly. Trump is ready to empower every pyramid schemer, peddler of fake “cures,” and investment scammer in the industry, which increasingly encompasses much of the technology industry.
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