This morning, the White House released a formal "Action Plan” with suggestions and proposals across nearly all facets of the AI industry. While the bulk of the document is standard fare (albeit devoid of any particular metrics or cost sheets), there are numerous massive red flags with how the current administration is planning to handle AI’s development over the next few years.
I believe two of these particular areas are particularly critical missteps:
- Erasing core safeguards (misinformation, DEI, and climate) from NIST’s AI risk management framework
- Sidelining environmental concerns of AI development via deregulation and/or a dramatic deemphasizing of existing emission reduction strategies
Gutting NIST’s AI guidelines
In the doc, the administration is explicitly ordering NIST to purge critical ethical considerations from their AI risk management framework (lauded in 2013 as a cornerstone for responsible AI, emphasizing that AI systems should be “valid and reliable, safe, secure and resilient, explainable, privacy-enhanced, and fair – with harmful bias managed”). There is a belief among the admin that removing these guidelines (which they falsely claim are “ideological”, as always) will help restore free speech and remove bias in the output of these models.
- Misinformation. The plan orders NIST to scrub the term entirely even as experts warn generative models crank out convincing falsehoods at scale, opening the door for election meddling and public‑health hoaxes. The models themselves, without the evils of human manipulation, still sport a 15% hallucination rate as of last year.
- DEI. Removing DEI (an initiative that a has become unreasonably politicized) strips requirements for diverse teams and fairness checks; real‑world studies already show AI-based face recognition, lending, and hiring tools discriminate against women and minorities. Losing diverse data requirements perpetuates real, measured biased outputs. Time and time (and time) again.
- Climate change. Deleting climate change references and metrics lets corporation off the hook, and serves to delegitimize the horrors around modern climate science predictions. Retaining climate-based measurements is a vital incentive that drives more efficient models.