Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders
Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump quickly got to work signing off on dozens — and counting — executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World...
Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders
Maggie Harrison Dupré
Tue, January 21, 2025 at 2:11 PM EST
4 min read
Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump got to work signing dozens — and counting — of executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization to ordering an end to birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America."
But while the executive actions range in scope, legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language — familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.
"Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they'd fare better in the courts," Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern remarked last night in a Bluesky post. "I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders."
"This is poor, slipshod work," he added, before alleging that the actions were "obviously assisted by AI."
In another post, Stern pointed to a deeply questionable section of an executive action titled "Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential," which details how the US will take advantage of the state's "untapped supply of natural resources," in part by drilling for fossil fuels in regions of previously-protected natural land.
In that section, the order includes a numbered list of several distinct Public Land Orders to be reinstated. Each land order, however, is listed next to the number one — an apparent slip-up, we should point out, that we've noticed on seemingly AI-generated content in the past.
Stern wasn't the only legal expert to question whether AI was used to help churn out executive actions.
In another post to Bluesky yesterday, the Houston-based appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian called attention to a section of another new executive order — titled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness" — that declares a rebrand of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Though the section isn't smattered with grammatical or formatting errors, its formulaic language does invoke a certain grade school-level "Answer Sandwich" sensibility that generative AI-powered chatbots are known for.
"The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species, and it is recognized as one of the most productive fisheries in the world, with the second largest volume of commercial fishing landings by region in the Nation, contributing millions of dollars to local American economies," reads the order. "The Gulf is also a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities."
"The Gulf of America part," Melkonian, for his part, alleged in his post, "was absolutely written by AI."
"I struggle to believe," agreed Stern, responding to Melkonian, "that a human, let alone a lawyer, wrote this 7th-grade book report-style description of the Gulf." (Indeed, when we asked ChatGPT for a "description of the importance of the Gulf of Mexico," it hit almost all the same notes.)
Other orders feature questionable errors and structural choices. The order to withdraw America from the WHO, for instance, includes some inexplicably bolded punctuation, while others, like one effectively withdrawing the US from a global corporate tax deal, fail to maintain uniform formatting standards throughout. And as Stern pointed out, certain grammatical or formatting errors — the latter perhaps worsened by poor copy-paste jobs — could lead to trouble down the line for the Trump Administration's attempts at enforcement.
"The weird typos and formatting errors could lead to confusion down the road," Stern wrote of the bungled numbered list. "If the Secretary of the Interior invoked his authority under Section XV(1) of this order, which of the 6 different subsections labeled 1 would [he] mean? And which number controls when a subsection has two different ones?"
Needless to say, this is all speculation. But it is based on experts' understandings of what normal executive orders should look like from a legal perspective. We reached out to the White House to inquire about the possible use of AI to draft executive actions, but haven't heard back.
Do you know anything about the White House's use of AI? Email us at tips@futurism.com
As New York Magazine's John Herrman observed last year, the question of whether a piece of content — let alone legal directives — might be AI-produced is increasingly a question of quality. In a murky digital world, it's often hard to tell: is what I'm looking at AI-generated? Or is just poorly executed human work?
"In the tech world, for now, AI's brand could not be stronger: It's associated with opportunity, potential, growth, and excitement," wrote Herrman. "For everyone else, it’s becoming interchangeable with things that sort of suck."
To that end, is it possible that the Trump administration's newly-signed executive orders were all crafted by humans, sans AI? Sure. Either way, though, the initial expert reviews of the executive actions are in — and according to those, they're weird and sloppy. And even if they're not AI, they feel like AI. For a forthcoming presidential administration, that's not a great place to be.
@jimjjackson2.bsky.social
