Trump's FTC Puts A Bullseye On The Back Of "Woke AI" As Elon Musk Defends Nude Deepfakes
The Trump-era FTC is simultaneously fighting against "woke" AI models while offering coverage and defense for a tech trillionaire accused of facilitating the creation of literal child porn.
There are just certain things that only a Trump-era federal agency can pull off with a straight face and genuine sincerity, and this is one of them — as Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission threatens Big Tech for “Woke AI” while Elon Musk sits in the background, stomping his feet and pouting his lip because someone’s trying to tell him Grok can’t make kiddie porn and he thinks that’s super mean and bigly unfair.
The world’s first trillionaire is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the state of Minnesota after a federal judge slapped down the request sent up the chain by the Tesla CEO’s artificial intelligence company xAI looking to block the Minnesota law that would effectively ban nude deepfakes used to sexually harass women and young girls from taking effect. The Minnesota ban grew teeth after Grok, perhaps xAI’s most signature and widely known product, introduced a feature within its AI that allowed users to digitally undress people in images it found circulating through the World Wide Web. Back in March, three young girls launched a lawsuit against Musk’s AI company, alleging that Grok was being used to create child sexual abuse materials, highlighting the fact that not only did Musk’s product generate nude images of human beings against their will and without their consent, but didn’t even have failsafes in place to ensure that Grok would not complete the task with images of children.
Amid the legal mess, Minnesota Governor and former Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz fittingly referred to Musk as a “creep.”
Elon Musk is fighting against a law that would prevent his AI product from hand-delivering child pornography straight into the hands of pedophiles.
While the child pornography aspect of this ordeal is undeniably the most serious and disgusting part of it all, it’s only a portion of much larger efforts spearheaded by Musk and other competing tech titans to corner an advantage on the regulatory terrain that is only just now beginning to creep into the environment of AI as the technology rapidly grows and outpaces current laws. Musk’s fight against the nude deepfake ban is only a fraction of his wide-sweeping campaign against “Woke AI,” as he desperately tries to keep the fingers of state laws out of his precious pie.
And now the big guy is getting involved.
Musk has once again aligned himself with President Donald Trump, despite their on-again-off-again history, who has spent his time in the White House issuing executive order after executive order in an attempt to mold and shape the development of AI and strip individual states of their power to regulate the technological monster. Because apparently, even with a raging forever war, a crashing economy, and polling numbers that likely have his father rolling in his grave calling him a loser, he has nothing better to do than play tech bro with his friends.
Now the Federal Trade Commission has thrown its hat in the ring in response to Trump’s orders, proposing a new policy last month that instantly raised the hackles of countless critics who are sounding alarm bells on the potential ramifications to the First Amendment as well as numerous civil rights laws, warning that the new policy will almost certainly incentivize AI companies into constructing AI models that prop up white nationalist narratives — a glaringly disturbing prospect in a world that has been all but taken over by AI, everywhere you look.
In a statement released on the matter, policy counsel at the digital rights group Free Press, Shilpa Jindia, said: “This tech-Trump alliance — far from bringing expertise to responsibly guide policy on tech and AI — has only furthered the administration’s corruption and enabled its campaign to censor and control our information ecosystem.”
Free Press is just one of many digital rights groups that have recently published public criticism of the Trump FTC’s proposed policy regarding “AI accuracy. The FTC invoked comments from Elon Musk and other right-wing tech giants on the topic of “woke AI.” The FTC’s disturbing statement claims that, if states are allowed to introduce regulations against AI companies, those companies may find themselves required by law, or even simply just “tempted” to train their large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude to answer users with “ideologically motivated distortions” to straightforward questions that should have objective answers.
In short, they’re worried that state regulations would force AI models to answer people with the “woke” truth about things like slavery, social injustices, and civil rights (to just name a few), and they want to ensure that AIs are not only able but encouraged to put a racist, white nationalist spin on things without fear of repercussions.
The FTC claims:
Allowing such ideological “distortions” may violate the federal law that created the FTC to protect consumers from deceptive advertising.
The FTC states that the use of LLMs as a source of information is “becoming part and parcel of daily life,” and they’re making it crystal clear that they’re prepared to take legal action against any AI companies that do not plaster disclaimers about ideological “distortions” all over the answers their AI model provides.
And don’t think for a second that they can just bury it in the fine print, because the FTC covered that too: “An adequate disclaimer could not be buried in terms of service, for instance.”
If the Trump-era Federal Trade Commission has its way, AI companies will either give users the white nationalism laced answers that the FTC wants these AI models to give, or they’ll be forced into including a disclaimer that essentially says, “HEY! WOKE RESPONSE INCOMING!”
They’ve intentionally constructed a lose-lose situation, forcing tech companies into submission, no matter which direction they choose, successfully creating an environment where any information deemed “woke” is automatically discredited.
Jindia said in a recent interview that, at the core of the FTC’s threats is nothing more than the super scary concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). What was once an open pool of ideas developed by educators and meant to address discriminatory policies across schools and workplaces has now been turned into a dogwhistle by the far-Right to instantly discredit any policy that even bears the faint odor of anti-racism, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-women, or progressivism.
Jindia told Truthout, “This began with Trump’s executive order signed on day one against DEI, and it’s under that guise they are going after AI outputs, or basically the content of AI.”
In March 2025, just shortly after he returned to the White House for his second, nonconsecutive term, Trump made a show out of firing the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, leaving two Republicans on what was meant to be a five-member, bipartisan panel. Trump’s newly molded FTC now warns that AI models could suppress “accuracy” in favor of “so-called equity,” claiming that the LLMs could reflect and produce the “ideologically motivated distortions” and beliefs of their creators, leading the AI itself to correct “what the developer believes are ‘historical injustices’ in the facts.”
Trump and his MAGA movement have continually not only outright denied the historical suffering of Black and Indigenous people, but pointedly worked to erase even the mere whisper from every nook, corner, and cranny of the United States federal government.
Jindia says:
It’s really a way for them to try to pressure private companies to suppress certain viewpoints, the viewpoints the Trump administration disagrees with, which is anything about diversity, equity, inclusion — and truth it wants to deny.
In their new proposal, the FTC is now threatening to legally punish companies for “deceptive advertising” unless they label their content woke, or give the racist answers they want them to give, a tactic that Jindia describes as “jawboning” — the use of public appeals or informal but intense pressure by public government officials to persuade and influence private companies, often at the expense of the First Amendment right to free speech. Ironically enough, Republicans openly accused the Biden Administration of employing those same “jawboning” tactics after the administration pressured private social media companies to enforce their own content moderation rules and policies surrounding disinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the Trump Administration is not only hypocritically using the same tactic, they’re attempting to force it into official federal law.
John Coleman, the legislative counsel at the non-partisan free-speech group, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said the FTC’s proposal is really nothing more than a vehicle for the federal government to control AI-generated expression, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
“AI developers shape their systems through choices about training data, system prompts, alignment, and other design decisions — editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. The FTC’s proposal assumes there is one ‘best output’ and one set of user expectations.”
The FTC is citing Section 5 of the FTC Act as authority to legally punish AI companies that “deceive” users with “woke” content. However, FIRE sharply points out to the FTC that consumers do not hold static or uniform views and expectations. In reality, AI users will likely choose their AI models in the same way they choose their news outlets: choosing a company that maintains values that most align with their own.
FIRE maintains:
Again, the First Amendment protects from government encroachment that freedom to choose where to share and receive information, and the Commission has no authority to recharacterize protected editorial decisions as “deceptive” based on a declaration that AI users monolithically desire to, as the Statement suggests, ‘feel that their values are being respected.’ The Commission has no authority to define Americans’ values.
At the core of it all, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) asserts that the FTC’s proposed policy is no more than an attempt to dismantle and undermine any state regulatory powers against AI so that the federal government, under Donald Trump’s purview, can corner and control the market.
Big Tech has long been fighting against state regulations with specific regard to the rapidly growing subset of artificial intelligence and they’ve now conveniently found themselves bearing the full weight of Donald Trump’s federal government in their pocket.
Jindia warned:
They are also trying to tell the states: Don’t pass laws that attempt to address racist algorithmic bias, even though everybody understands that it’s been a documented problem in the rise of machine learning. This is part of the same censorship campaign that has been in place since day one of the Trump administration, and just expanding it to AI.”
At the end of the day, though, don’t forget that Elon Musk defended the production of kiddie porn with his whole chest.