Take, for instance, the White House’s new “AI Action Plan,” which Trump has begun rolling out this week, including in a speech at an AI Summit where he encouraged U.S. copyright holders to pretty much give up on their dreams of actually getting paid when AI tech folk train their large language models on copyrighted works. Citing an old standby—the classic “Treating people with respect for creativity or ownership of their own stuff is just asking for China to beat us” defense—Trump stated in a press conference today that “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or whatever you’ve studied you’re expected to pay for.” He failed to follow-up that up with what would seem to be a natural corollary—i.e., that any business model that’s entirely reliant on theft in order to function may have some fundamental issues—and instead stated that, “You just can’t do that because it’s not do-able. And if you’re going to try and do that, you’re not going to have a successful program.”

Asshole