Glenn Beck previewed a supposedly educational, but admittedly expensive, artificial intelligence version of George Washington—one which sounds a lot like Beck, with the right prodding.
Beck said on his show over the weekend that something called George AI is in the works for The Torch, a forthcoming tool which he says is to promote civics and U.S. history education as part of the Glenn and Tania Beck Foundation for American History, a privately funded trust. Beck’s collection of historical documents is now the third-largest private collection in the world, he claims on his website, and his AI version of Washington is its librarian.
“We fed in all of the conditions of what’s happening in America today,” Beck, 61, said, introducing an excerpt of a conversation with Washington’s black t-shirt-wearing likeness.
“Based on your writings and writings of the rest of the founders, what is it that you feel is the biggest problem or where we should start to fix things?” Beck asked.
But when “Washington” began to answer, Beck told him to “dumb it down.”
Beck interrupted again after the computer explained that it had “29 points that are all referenced to exactly what we said in the—”
“Speak in today’s language,” instructed Beck, who then got what he wanted to hear.
“Let me speak to Americans. If I’m honest, America’s biggest problem isn’t political or economic. It’s all moral,” it began.
“You’ve drifted from the morals that make liberty possible in the first place,” it continued as Beck played a montage of positive moments in U.S. history.
Freedom requires faith, discipline, and character, it continued.
“If you don’t have any of those things, laws can’t stop anything and they mean little,” it went on, as videos of riots and looting were shown. “Government turns either weak or oppressive. You have grown skeptical of truth, you’re reckless with debt, you’re comfortable blaming instead of building anything. And in my time, we understood that self-governance begins with self-control… The fix isn’t going to be found in Washington, D.C. It’s going to be found in every home, every school, every heart.”
Beck said that his project is much costlier than, say, picking up a book from your free local library—“compute power is so expensive”—but he said he hopes that costs on his end will go down the more people sign up to use it.
Beck, a former Fox News host, also admitted that the answers “Washington” is inclined to give are “tedious,” and so he was in favor of pushing it to “dumb” things down. This, despite the fact that the computer-generated likeness responding in plain English sounded like just anyone with a podcast.
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