Tripp Mickle

And I am more of a hardliner on this than anything else I've ever been a hardliner on.

He hasn't been real explicit about what those rules should be, but he's definitely channeled what he believes is the anger building of working class people and the uneasiness of working class people who are seeing this big transformative technology barreling down the tracks at them and feeling like nobody's in the engine room steering the trains.

Exactly.

And the interesting thing about this is it's not just an economic argument that's gotten momentum within the MAGA base.

There's also a moral argument that's been building as well.

I stumbled upon this by talking to a pastor in Texas, you know.

in a conversation with this pastor, I was like, why did you become part of the AI opposition movement?

And he started doing it because he met with a parishioner who told him a story about a friend whose marriage was on the rocks because he was having a relationship with an AI companion and it had completely destroyed and gutted the relationship he had with his wife.

You know, and this pastor is concerned about how many other people might wind up in the same situation in the future.

Right.

And like what stress and strain does this put on kind of the moral fabric of America?

And this isn't an isolated thing.

There were more than three dozen pastors who signed on to a letter with Steve Bannon urging the Trump administration to actually sign this executive order that we spent time talking about.

They just want somebody to take the wheel and they don't want that somebody to be the tech industry that seems to have the presidency here.

Not really.

I mean, they feel like it's a step forward, but they'd like to see a bigger step taken.

And when I asked one of the organizers of the letter, what would you like to really see happen?

They said that one of the things that they're supportive of is a bipartisan piece of legislation that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri advanced.

that would create a national AI system to evaluate more rigorously and like on a mandatory basis artificial intelligence models before they're released.

First of all, it's worth noting that Bernie Sanders has just gone deep on artificial intelligence.