AI and Trump A Tale of Two Obsessions

A Conversation with ChatGPT on Tariffs

I was talking to my good friend ChatGPT when I decided to ask it about Trump’s tariffs. It was resolute in its position that they are a bad idea. According to the AI, they’ll drive up prices, press consumer spending, spur international retaliation, and potentially ignite a global recession.

My first thought was that the chatbot was just being a gladhandler, servicing my own biases. I’d never discussed politics with it before, but it knows all kinds of things about me. It can easily, in a microsecond, read my posts and my op-eds, so it can deduce where I stand.

The Search for Another Side

Despite myself, I wanted to know if there was another side—a reason why the tariffs might be a good idea, possessed of some vague merit, even if unpopular or lacking in intellectual support. In wishing for this alternative perspective, I sensed that the human ritual of seeking another side, however natural, has become corrupted in the social media age. With so many voices chattering at once, perhaps we’re all too eager to divide everything into simplistic, comprehensible binaries.

It seems we’re about a week and a half away from a large segment of the population beginning to willfully smash itself in the face with hammers, a phenomenon which would inevitably fuel a widespread “debate” over whether or not people should, with surprisingly high numbers of our friends and neighbors saying they’re open to it.

Regardless, I didn’t want AI, which is fundamentally constructed of language, issuing me some precooked partisan take. So I asked it if it was just servicing my biases. It said no. Then I asked it if it could furnish a rational argument in favor of the tariffs.

It said it could not.

AI and Trump The Twin Obsessions of Our Time

And then I got to thinking about power, where it’s concentrated, and how hard it is to battle against when one doesn’t have it. I thought about how powerful AI is, and how powerful Trump is, and how the two topics are like a twin collective obsession, leading our species to walk around going, “But Trump…But…but…AI. But, also — Trump! And what about AI?!”

We are marveling at power. Unable to manage it. Waiting on its next move. Fearing the worst. Hoping (somehow) for the best.

What is this time we’re living in? What is this level of the game? Trump and AI. AI and Trump. They have nothing in common save for sheer, unbridled momentum, and the fact that we can’t stop thinking and talking about them. Beyond that:

One is all brain and no personality.

The other is all personality and no brain.

Eric Shapiro

Eric Shapiro is a writer & filmmaker. As a screenwriter, he’s won a Fade In Award and written numerous feature films in development by companies including WWE, Mandalay Sports Media, Game1, and Select Films. He is also the resident script doctor for Rebel Six Films (producers of A&E’s “Hoarders”). As a journalist, Eric’s won a California Journalism Award and is co-owner and editor of The Milpitas Beat, a Silicon Valley newspaper with tens of thousands of monthly readers that has won the Golden Quill Award as well as the John Swett Award for Media Excellence. As a filmmaker, Eric’s directed award-winning feature films that have premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, and Shriekfest, and been endorsed by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Eric’s apocalyptic novella “It’s Only Temporary” appears next to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” on Nightmare Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Horror Novels of All Time. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Rhoda, and their two sons.