WASHINGTON — Breitbart News Social Media Director and New York Times best-selling author Wynton Hall emphasized that conservatives need a tacit position on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can be disseminated at the grassroots level to compete with the left’s AI narrative.
Hall, the author of the forthcoming HarperCollins book, dove deep into the AI narrative war during a breakout session panel on “AI and the American Soul” at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC. He noted at the top of his remarks that the conservative movement holds well-defined beliefs on an array of key issues among the American electorate, but it is “less so” with AI.
“I think that when we think about artificial intelligence in the conservative movement, the question is: What is the conservative position on AI? I mean, when we talk about pro-life, we talk about gun control, we talk about national security, things of that sort, taxes, we sort of know where people are on a 90-10 scale in the conservative movement. But it’s less so, I think, right now. Some people think that’s because we’re at a nascent state in AI. We’re really not, obviously. Since 1956, we’ve had this term, and there’s been an enormous trajectory more recently.”
Hall referenced Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart’s poignant quote that “politics is downstream from culture,” adding that tech elites take the position that “code is upstream from culture,” meaning the tech sector influences culture.
“But I think that the most important thing that I’d like to focus on is the narrative war over artificial intelligence,” Hall said. “I do work at Breitbart. I wear many other hats, but Andrew obviously, famously said, ‘Politics is downstream from culture.’ I think the tech elites believe that code is upstream from culture and therefore can control and affect the citizenry in a very direct and powerful way.”
“AI is the most, I think, powerful political weapon. I don’t think it is a tool. I think it is an information system that will touch virtually every policy dimension that all of the people in here and in this conference and beyond, work on — whether you’re talking about education, whether you’re talking about national security, certainly in economics and jobs,” Hall continued.
Hall focused on three central topics in his remarks: the stakes of the AI narrative war, agentic AI, which are AI systems that require little human oversight to accomplish tasks, and “fractal truths” that will aid in navigating through AI development to this point and what awaits on the horizon.
Regarding the stakes of the AI narrative war, Hall pointed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s social experiment as president of Y Combinator in 2016, where he sought to give low-income individuals $1,000 without strings attached. Altman said such a model would one day be employed at a national level, and even referenced the implications this would have on fundamental human motivation to work that has driven society since the dawn of man.
“He was going to do this in pilot programs,” Hall said. “He was going to do it for several years. He meant what he said; he put in $14 million of the $60 million of his own money and the reason he said he wanted to do this, he put up on a blog post, and I’m reading directly from his blog: ‘As technology eliminates jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.’”
“Now, all of us in here recognize this to be universal basic income or UBI, but then, he dropped the mask a little more and let the mask slip even beyond that. In his blog comments, he wrote, ‘I think one day it will seem ridiculous … that fear of not eating was how we motivated people economically.’ Now, for free market people and people that believe in sort of the Judeo-Christian work ethic and the rest of it, that’s a pretty strident statement, right?” Hall asked rhetorically. “You’re really snapping the hinge of the human motivation for economic flourishing, not just in terms of your own personal identity, your own ability to feed yourself and your family, but also to build wealth and security for your progeny. That man’s name was Sam Altman, and of course, today, he runs OpenAI. He has been a very strong donor for democratic causes — up until the recent new administration, had given exclusively to Democrats.”
This brings Hall to the crux of the implications for society at large, as Altman’s 2016 position essentially represents the Democrat argument in the AI narrative war.
“For centuries, America’s soul thrived on free markets powered by this notion of striving, and this question is, now, is the mode of AI going to mean that work is outdated, dependency is progress, and leisure is the future? That really is the narrative war,” he said. “Whether or not that comes to pass, that’s why we have these conversations, and I think we need to be having these conversations.”
Hall expressed his concern among conservatives at the grassroots level, noting there is no clear position on AI among the conservative base.
“I personally am very concerned that at the grassroots level, we’re really not fully as coached up on these topics and really thinking through the five-dimensional chess that we’re going to be confronting,” Hall told the room. “Our usual place is a default position of conservatives defaulting to answering automation with the same refrain, right? ‘Oh, I’ve heard this before. The robots are coming. It never happens. Jobs get created. Jobs get destroyed. The free market will work it out.’ But of course, this time, the AI Titans claim this will be different and we’re talking about … Dario Amodei, obviously Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI.”
“Some conservatives kick back and say, ‘Well, you know, look, LLMs [Large Language Models] are just stochastic parrots. It’s nothing but a fancy auto-complete. Nothing to see here. Even Yann LeCun claims that an LLM is no smarter than your average house cat. This isn’t going to be an economic threat the way that it’s been postured.’ But of course, those who study AI and are certainly building it have quite a rejoinder to make,” he continued. “And that is the crux of the point, which is going to be agentic AI, and whether or not the promises we’re hearing from, you know, just recently, two months ago, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei saying that you’re going to see the vaporization of 50 percent of white collar entry-level positions.”
Hall emphasized that this is a major concern for young people and those who have children and are raising families, adding that the left is working to sell job displacements as “imminent and inevitable.”
“If you’ve played with agentic AI, you might again feel like, ‘Wow, it’s very nascent. We’ve still got all these problems with hallucinations. You’re going to have all sorts of issues with permissions and the rest of it, whether you’re talking about Perplexity’s Comet or OpenAI’s Operator.’ But here’s the narrative plot twist for us, I think politically: It almost doesn’t matter — that reality in the short term. The narrative war is: Can you convince people that job displacements at scale are imminent and inevitable?” Hall detailed. “And, you know, that this is the move the left has made because they’re not hiding it. They’re literally saying, as Ilhan Omar said, ‘Covid was just a dry run for UBI, right? We got people used to mailbox money, and now that we’ve seeded that terrain, it’s time for the three-day work week, four-day work week.’ We’re seeing Bill Gates seed that narrative as well.”
Hall’s position is that agentic AI is not merely “marketing hype,” adding, “I’m talking about actual autonomous end-to-end work replacement.”
Hall concluded by offering five critical points to conservatives, the first being that they are entering into a “Code-Red era” equating AI to fire, which can be used in a pragmatic manner to heat a meal or a destructive manner to bring a civilization to ruin.
“I think … we are entering a code-red era for conservatives: Code Red as an alert flare, but also … we need a code. We need to have a unified position,” Hall said, stressing he is not talking about narrow AI, which nearly every member of society already uses in the form of a weather app or Netflix account.
“We’re talking about the big stuff, but if you believe that [AI] is like fire, then the torch bearers are going to matter, and so we should understand that we will have wide pendulum swings based upon political shifts,” he predicted.
Secondly, in an increasingly AI-driven world, Hall predicts that America’s children will need to be taught to create jobs rather than merely finding them, as has been the societal norm, especially considering his third position that white collar jobs are vulnerable in the long term.
“I think that, you know, kids are not going to just be able to be taught to find jobs; they’re going to have to be taught to create them, my personal view,” Hall said. “And shout out to the classicist over here, Spencer [Klavan], is that the trivium is still the basis, but I think we could have two silos on top of that, an entrepreneurial layer as well as an AI layer. I think white collar jobs are really at risk long-term, and by that, I mean five to ten years, probably less. The ‘More of X Paradox,’ this idea that things that we find hard are easy for machines and vice versa, is true, and so white collar jobs tend to be more at risk than the blue collar.”
Fourth, Hall says that the trajectory of AI’s most substantial threat is government bureaucracy.
“The biggest threat, I think, for the people with the smart brains in this room that we will want to be tracking over the next several years with AI trajectory, is the bureaucracy,” Hall shared. “I think the danger is invisible algorithms, AI-powered social credit, digital de-banking, cancel culture, scan-and-ban technology like Mike Benz fights against.”
Finally, Hall said that workers who are not at the end of their careers will face a “brutal speed efficiency” to chase.
“I think the final thing is on a personal level. If you’re not at the end of your career, and you have great aspirations and fire in the belly, you’re going to have a brutal speed efficiency to catch up because of the speed with which the ground is shifting,” he said.
Hall is optimistic that conservatives can win the AI-narrative war, but stressed that the clock is ticking.
“I think conservatives can win that narrative battle, but we’ve got a lot of work to do because if the left wins, AI becomes dependence, surveillance, and indoctrination, and America drained of its soul,” Hall stated. “I think that we, on the other hand, can fight against those pixelated prisons and keep the ideas flowing freely.”
“People often say, if you had to put it in a word, picture sort of where are we right now. We saw the Trump AI action policy, very pro-innovation, very first word past the introduction is acceleration, so I think we clearly have a guidelight there of where policy will be shifting,” he concluded. “But I would say that right now, the everyday person sort of sees the right foot of America in the roses, the potential, if you will, metaphorically, and then the left foot hovering over that potential landmine, existential or political. I think, together, hopefully with the bright minds here and in this movement, we can plant both of America’s feet on virtuous soil and preserve freedom and protect our soul.”
Discussion about this post