Melania Trump Is the Perfect Person to Lead Kids to the AI-Slop Trough
Melania Trump has picked her project as first lady: proliferating AI. On Tuesday, she announced the Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge, a “Presidential Fitness Challenge” for the less phys. ed. inclined that will task K-12 students with using AI tools to solve community-based problems, and made it clear that she will be the face of the Trump administration’s AI push.
Frankly, she’s perfect.
Firstly, she’d be right for just about any cause you put in front of her because she is simply an ambient human. She can serve as the face of just about anything, and it is acceptable to most audiences because she’s a largely inoffensive and sometimes even sympathetic figure. She’s basically always polled with higher approval ratings than her husband despite standing by him for everything, like she’s lovely wallpaper placed on the wall of a torture chamber. During her modeling career, she served as the spokesmodel for Camel cigarettes and faced basically zero pushback or objection for doing so because the attitude of the general public seems to be, “Who cares what Melania Trump does or did?”
But taking on AI is ideal for a person who is constantly doing an impression of someone else’s work in a way that just isn’t quite right. Melania has cribbed a lot from Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy. She’s done everything from fashion to taking a page out of her book and redesigning the White House Rose Garden—the Melania’s take is much less serene and more concrete, a real “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”-ass interpretation of Kennedy’s work. Trump has even insisted that Melania is the “Jackie O” of our time, which, much like AI chatbots, is an innovation most of us simply never asked for.
She also famously plagiarized a speech from Michelle Obama, which is a quality befitting the plagiarism machine that is AI. That whole situation also raised some interesting and previously underconsidered questions about copyright, which is something Big Tech firms (sucking up as much data and information as possible, regardless of copyright protections, to train their large language models) can certainly relate to.
She got hit with plagiarism charges again in 2018 when she launched her first cause as First Lady, tackling cyberbullying, after it was discovered that her “Be Best” campaign bore a striking resemblance to an almost identical initiative that was started during the Obama administration. But hey, it’s way easier to do the work when it’s already been done for you.
Melania told the New York Post that she hopes to become the “First Lady of Technology,” and she’s already done a fair amount of embracing tech with very little discernment as to whether it’s actually good or not. She’s got some ideas, to be fair: the TAKE IT DOWN Act that she backed in an effort to stop non-consensual deepfakes of people from proliferating has its intentions in the right place, whether the approach is good policy is another question, and her anti-cyberbullying campaign had the right spirit (though she should maybe talk to her husband about his social media presence).
But she’s also happy to embrace tech without any real consideration of the consequences, whether that is the mostly harmless decision to publish an audiobook in which an AI model trained on her voice serves as the narrator or lend her name and likeness to a crypto memecoin that cost people millions. Much like AI, she could be useful if applied correctly, but mostly, she does more harm than good.
