November 25, 2025 • 11 mins
ABC News tech reporter Mike Dobuski joins the show for ‘Tech Tuesday.’ Today, Mike talks about President Trump signing an executive order on artificial intelligence and… where’s YOUR X account from?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mike Dubuski.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
It is Tech Tuesday, ABC Technology Reporter and he's at
Michael Dobuski. That's d o b Uski. Mike, thank you
for joining us. Always appreciated.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yes, it is okay Trump. I love this EO on AI.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Okay, you want to explain that, because there's actually a
story there there is.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yes, EO is Executive order and AI is of course
artificial intelligence, which we just can't seem to get away
from in the tech sector at this point. Two major
executive orders kind of in the mix here in the
Trump administration this week. Yesterday, on Monday, the Trump administration
signed what they call Project Genesis, which is basically an
(00:49):
executive order designed to spur the use of generative artificial
intelligence in scientific research. In fact, it directs the Department
of Energy to actually build its own AI plant form
fed by data collected by the federal government that academics
can use in their research. So it's another tool in
their toolbox. That was signed by the President on Monday,
(01:10):
But the bigger executive order could very well come later
this week, and this has been generating a lot of
conversation in Washington to The Trump administration is reportedly considering
this EO that would put a halt to AI legislation
at the state level. The Trump administration the goal here, says,
The goal here is to make it easier for AI
companies to develop this technology a mid what they see
(01:34):
as a global race for AI supremacy. They say that
clearing the field of a patchwork of AI legislation at
the state level and in favor of sort of forthcoming
AI legislation at the federal level will make it a
lot easier for companies like open ai and Google and
Anthropic to navigate as they build large language models to
be competitive with specifically China.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Okay, so let me let me ask this.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Okay, we know that the denial of money to universities
for medical research, et cetera, that is a political move.
I mean, no one disagrees, whether you're one side or
the other, No one disagrees that that the basis of
that policy is political. Moving over to this executive order,
(02:19):
can this is this political?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Does it have any political overtones?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Which one are we talking about? The one that's already
been signed or the one that has not been signed yet?
Both both well, I mean, I think, you know, anything
that comes from really any presidential administration is by nature political.
The one to sort of spur scientific research, you know,
seems pretty standard. It doesn't seem to be generating a
ton of controversy out there, but certainly the one that
(02:47):
you know is forthcoming that reportedly, you know, the Trump
administration is working on to curtail state level AI legislation
is really generating some some heated political back and forth,
and interestingly enough, it comes from both sides of the aisle.
It's kind of the Trump administration against state governments. For example,
we've seen Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, of course,
(03:09):
ran against President Trump in the Republican primary last cycle.
He called this move federal government overreach that would stop
state's ability to protect against what he calls predatory applications,
the target children, and of course, Democratic Senator Ed Markey
says this move would amount to President Trump siding with
his billionaire buddies in Silicon Valley. There have also been
(03:30):
several high profile letters to Congress aimed at raising the
alarm about this forthcoming executive order. The Leadership Conference Center
for Civil Rights and Technology says this gives corporations a
free pass rather than protecting the people it's meant to serve.
And of course there is some reporting out there, namely
from Reuters, which indicates that this might actually be working
on the Trump administration then reporting that they might be
(03:52):
adjusting their timeline. We originally thought that this order was
going to be signed this week. That might be sliding somewhat.
And of course, I forget earlier this year during the
passage of the defensele to some of the risks associated
with AI. It's going to be really interesting to see
how this plays out because the Trump administration needs to
balance both the sort of national and global race for
AI with a lot of the satan concerns inherent to
(04:15):
this technology.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Mike, we're talking about what the Trump administration. What Donald
Trump did was sign on to well, he sign an
executive order on taking AI and wants to take it federally.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
In terms of the laws.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Now, having been in reproductive law, my entire legal career
was third party reproductive law. The technology was always miles
ahead of the law. The law never keeps up with
the technology. How aggressive are the states and the federal government?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
And going after controlling.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
This again, it really does seem to be a state
effort at this point. There is no federal regulation governing
the use or deployment of AI. That is really what
spurred a lot of these states, among them California, Colorado, Utah,
Texas to pass legislation at their level. So, yeah, you're
(05:12):
absolutely right to say that the pace of technological development
does outpace the level at which we can pass you know,
substantive laws. But it does seem like we're at a
stage now where there's this real consideration among lawmakers as
to who's going to go about this right if not Congress. Well,
certain states want some protections in place, and just to
(05:33):
give you a little overview of what those laws look like,
you know, in California, you guys have passed laws AI
legislation aimed at limiting the collection of personal data from
AI companies, forcing AI companies to be more transparent with
the data they do collect. Of course, that's very relevant
given how many tech companies are based in California, but
we've also seen that, as we said, in Colorado, Utah, Texas,
(05:56):
other states beyond that have passed regulations around using AI
to generate deep fakes of political figures and using AI
to create non consensual pornography, so it really does cover
a broad remit. But if this executive order does go
into effect, this would be basically clean the slate, wipe
the table in uh, you know, anticipation of some future
(06:17):
federal regulation to come.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
And one last question about that, and that is is
this front front burner stuff for the states that they're
viewing this as absolutely critical and we have to do
it now, I would say increasingly.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
So, yeah, absolutely, given you know how many stories have
been emerging about you know, AI going wrong for people.
You know this that's an unfortunate story, but you know
many people have you know, become obsessed with many of
these chatbots. They are in some small way designed to
you know, uh, support your thinking and to keep you
using them. That is true of not to this AI platforms,
(06:53):
many tech platforms as well. People have even you know,
cut off communication with their families, gone missing, and some
dream case has actually taken their own lives and the
lives of others. And that really does get the attention
of lawmakers, you know, who say, hey, we got to
do something. You know, the federal government's not going to act,
we at state level will all.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Right, switching gears story about the genesis of an X account.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Where's your ex account coming from?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
This broke and this actually turns out to be a
huge political issue on top of everything else.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, it does. And this new feature that X rolled
out over the weekend, the company says, is designed to
provide more transparency into people's accounts, basically, so you know
who you're interacting with online. They've gone about this in
a couple different ways. You've already been able to see
when someone signed up for the platform. It tells you
kind of what they joined or the general time period
(07:46):
in which they joined. You can now see how many
times a given account has changed their username, which could
be interesting. But the big example is that it will
now show where that account is based. And the really
big thing that's been happening as a result of this
feature is that's some people have been discovering that the
accounts they've been following, specifically the ones that cover politics,
actually originate from outside of the United States. Just some
(08:08):
examples here. There's one account with over two hundred thousand
followers last week called American Voice. It posted you know,
updates about the news and you know, various sort of
you know, tweets and posts about what was going on
in American politics. After this update rolled out, followers found
it was being run from somewhere in South Asia, and
now that account has been deleted. There was another account
(08:28):
that posted about President Trump's daughter, just news items about
Avanka Trump that according to this feature, that account is
actually based in Nigeria, And an account called Abujama Gaza that,
according to this account's profile, is a Gaza based journalist
covering the war. According to this feature, it's actually based
in Poland. So it really does underscore how the information
(08:48):
environment on access maybe a little bit more complex than
we initially thought.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Okay, so one quick question before I bail. In terms
of the political side of this, are these daw x
accounts more conservative, more liberal, more conspiracy theorists, or is
across the board.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So we don't have a ton of hard numbers on this,
but it is worth saying that these accounts do come
from both sides of the aisle. They are not exclusively
political accounts. Sometimes they're just accounts that post sort of
viral content or content that goes wide on that platform.
The bigger picture here really is that since Elon Musk
took over the platform, there's been really an intense effort
(09:30):
to monetize viral posts. So if you post something that
a lot of people like or reshare, you can make
a couple bucks off that, And to you or me,
that's just a couple bucks, it's not really that much.
But in developing countries specifically, that can actually amount to
quite a lot of money. So there's this incentive structure
at X to create viral content. I think the reason
that we're talking about in the context of politics is
(09:51):
that when you post something about politics on social media,
generally speaking, that does get a lot of engagement. Not
always get good engagement, but any engagement does equal dollars,
and I think that's exactly why you're seeing this happen
right now.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Is Musk making money on X?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
I know he overpaid for it ridiculously, but has it
turned around and monetize enough to where Lisa is not
burning through money?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
It's an interesting question. Again, we don't have a ton
of insight into his personal finances when it comes to
this company, although you're correct to say that he did
overpay by quite a hefty margin, the tens of billions.
When it comes to purchasing this platform back in twenty
twenty three. But another sort of interesting data point that
people might not be paying attention to is that despite
the fact that we talked about how the changes that
(10:35):
Elon Musk made to X drove this exodus from the platform,
a lot of people stopping using that platform because they
didn't agree with the policies of Elon Musk, a lot
of advertisers leaving a lot of those advertisers have actually
come back in the years since, and a recent Pew
survey found that more than one in five Americans still
use X formerly Twitter. While the competitors that we talked
(10:56):
about a lot, things like Threads and Blue Sky, they
remain comparabletively bit players in this space. So despite all
the talk about it, they do remain a pretty hasty,
you know, force in the world of social media.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Mike, thank you, we'll talk again. Always, great stuff. I
have a good day, you too, take care, Happy Thanksgiving.
That's what you're supposed to say, isn't it. That's what
they tell me.
Mike Dubuski.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
It is Tech Tuesday, ABC Technology Reporter and he's at
Michael Dobuski. That's d o b Uski. Mike, thank you
for joining us. Always appreciated.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yes, it is okay Trump. I love this EO on AI.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Okay, you want to explain that, because there's actually a
story there there is.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yes, EO is Executive order and AI is of course
artificial intelligence, which we just can't seem to get away
from in the tech sector at this point. Two major
executive orders kind of in the mix here in the
Trump administration this week. Yesterday, on Monday, the Trump administration
signed what they call Project Genesis, which is basically an
(00:49):
executive order designed to spur the use of generative artificial
intelligence in scientific research. In fact, it directs the Department
of Energy to actually build its own AI plant form
fed by data collected by the federal government that academics
can use in their research. So it's another tool in
their toolbox. That was signed by the President on Monday,
(01:10):
But the bigger executive order could very well come later
this week, and this has been generating a lot of
conversation in Washington to The Trump administration is reportedly considering
this EO that would put a halt to AI legislation
at the state level. The Trump administration the goal here, says,
The goal here is to make it easier for AI
companies to develop this technology a mid what they see
(01:34):
as a global race for AI supremacy. They say that
clearing the field of a patchwork of AI legislation at
the state level and in favor of sort of forthcoming
AI legislation at the federal level will make it a
lot easier for companies like open ai and Google and
Anthropic to navigate as they build large language models to
be competitive with specifically China.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Okay, so let me let me ask this.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Okay, we know that the denial of money to universities
for medical research, et cetera, that is a political move.
I mean, no one disagrees, whether you're one side or
the other, No one disagrees that that the basis of
that policy is political. Moving over to this executive order,
(02:19):
can this is this political?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Does it have any political overtones?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Which one are we talking about? The one that's already
been signed or the one that has not been signed yet?
Both both well, I mean, I think, you know, anything
that comes from really any presidential administration is by nature political.
The one to sort of spur scientific research, you know,
seems pretty standard. It doesn't seem to be generating a
ton of controversy out there, but certainly the one that
(02:47):
you know is forthcoming that reportedly, you know, the Trump
administration is working on to curtail state level AI legislation
is really generating some some heated political back and forth,
and interestingly enough, it comes from both sides of the aisle.
It's kind of the Trump administration against state governments. For example,
we've seen Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, of course,
(03:09):
ran against President Trump in the Republican primary last cycle.
He called this move federal government overreach that would stop
state's ability to protect against what he calls predatory applications,
the target children, and of course, Democratic Senator Ed Markey
says this move would amount to President Trump siding with
his billionaire buddies in Silicon Valley. There have also been
(03:30):
several high profile letters to Congress aimed at raising the
alarm about this forthcoming executive order. The Leadership Conference Center
for Civil Rights and Technology says this gives corporations a
free pass rather than protecting the people it's meant to serve.
And of course there is some reporting out there, namely
from Reuters, which indicates that this might actually be working
on the Trump administration then reporting that they might be
(03:52):
adjusting their timeline. We originally thought that this order was
going to be signed this week. That might be sliding somewhat.
And of course, I forget earlier this year during the
passage of the defensele to some of the risks associated
with AI. It's going to be really interesting to see
how this plays out because the Trump administration needs to
balance both the sort of national and global race for
AI with a lot of the satan concerns inherent to
(04:15):
this technology.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Mike, we're talking about what the Trump administration. What Donald
Trump did was sign on to well, he sign an
executive order on taking AI and wants to take it federally.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
In terms of the laws.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Now, having been in reproductive law, my entire legal career
was third party reproductive law. The technology was always miles
ahead of the law. The law never keeps up with
the technology. How aggressive are the states and the federal government?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
And going after controlling.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
This again, it really does seem to be a state
effort at this point. There is no federal regulation governing
the use or deployment of AI. That is really what
spurred a lot of these states, among them California, Colorado, Utah,
Texas to pass legislation at their level. So, yeah, you're
(05:12):
absolutely right to say that the pace of technological development
does outpace the level at which we can pass you know,
substantive laws. But it does seem like we're at a
stage now where there's this real consideration among lawmakers as
to who's going to go about this right if not Congress. Well,
certain states want some protections in place, and just to
(05:33):
give you a little overview of what those laws look like,
you know, in California, you guys have passed laws AI
legislation aimed at limiting the collection of personal data from
AI companies, forcing AI companies to be more transparent with
the data they do collect. Of course, that's very relevant
given how many tech companies are based in California, but
we've also seen that, as we said, in Colorado, Utah, Texas,
(05:56):
other states beyond that have passed regulations around using AI
to generate deep fakes of political figures and using AI
to create non consensual pornography, so it really does cover
a broad remit. But if this executive order does go
into effect, this would be basically clean the slate, wipe
the table in uh, you know, anticipation of some future
(06:17):
federal regulation to come.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
And one last question about that, and that is is
this front front burner stuff for the states that they're
viewing this as absolutely critical and we have to do
it now, I would say increasingly.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
So, yeah, absolutely, given you know how many stories have
been emerging about you know, AI going wrong for people.
You know this that's an unfortunate story, but you know
many people have you know, become obsessed with many of
these chatbots. They are in some small way designed to
you know, uh, support your thinking and to keep you
using them. That is true of not to this AI platforms,
(06:53):
many tech platforms as well. People have even you know,
cut off communication with their families, gone missing, and some
dream case has actually taken their own lives and the
lives of others. And that really does get the attention
of lawmakers, you know, who say, hey, we got to
do something. You know, the federal government's not going to act,
we at state level will all.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Right, switching gears story about the genesis of an X account.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Where's your ex account coming from?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
This broke and this actually turns out to be a
huge political issue on top of everything else.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, it does. And this new feature that X rolled
out over the weekend, the company says, is designed to
provide more transparency into people's accounts, basically, so you know
who you're interacting with online. They've gone about this in
a couple different ways. You've already been able to see
when someone signed up for the platform. It tells you
kind of what they joined or the general time period
(07:46):
in which they joined. You can now see how many
times a given account has changed their username, which could
be interesting. But the big example is that it will
now show where that account is based. And the really
big thing that's been happening as a result of this
feature is that's some people have been discovering that the
accounts they've been following, specifically the ones that cover politics,
actually originate from outside of the United States. Just some
(08:08):
examples here. There's one account with over two hundred thousand
followers last week called American Voice. It posted you know,
updates about the news and you know, various sort of
you know, tweets and posts about what was going on
in American politics. After this update rolled out, followers found
it was being run from somewhere in South Asia, and
now that account has been deleted. There was another account
(08:28):
that posted about President Trump's daughter, just news items about
Avanka Trump that according to this feature, that account is
actually based in Nigeria, And an account called Abujama Gaza that,
according to this account's profile, is a Gaza based journalist
covering the war. According to this feature, it's actually based
in Poland. So it really does underscore how the information
(08:48):
environment on access maybe a little bit more complex than
we initially thought.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Okay, so one quick question before I bail. In terms
of the political side of this, are these daw x
accounts more conservative, more liberal, more conspiracy theorists, or is
across the board.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So we don't have a ton of hard numbers on this,
but it is worth saying that these accounts do come
from both sides of the aisle. They are not exclusively
political accounts. Sometimes they're just accounts that post sort of
viral content or content that goes wide on that platform.
The bigger picture here really is that since Elon Musk
took over the platform, there's been really an intense effort
(09:30):
to monetize viral posts. So if you post something that
a lot of people like or reshare, you can make
a couple bucks off that, And to you or me,
that's just a couple bucks, it's not really that much.
But in developing countries specifically, that can actually amount to
quite a lot of money. So there's this incentive structure
at X to create viral content. I think the reason
that we're talking about in the context of politics is
(09:51):
that when you post something about politics on social media,
generally speaking, that does get a lot of engagement. Not
always get good engagement, but any engagement does equal dollars,
and I think that's exactly why you're seeing this happen
right now.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Is Musk making money on X?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
I know he overpaid for it ridiculously, but has it
turned around and monetize enough to where Lisa is not
burning through money?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
It's an interesting question. Again, we don't have a ton
of insight into his personal finances when it comes to
this company, although you're correct to say that he did
overpay by quite a hefty margin, the tens of billions.
When it comes to purchasing this platform back in twenty
twenty three. But another sort of interesting data point that
people might not be paying attention to is that despite
the fact that we talked about how the changes that
(10:35):
Elon Musk made to X drove this exodus from the platform,
a lot of people stopping using that platform because they
didn't agree with the policies of Elon Musk, a lot
of advertisers leaving a lot of those advertisers have actually
come back in the years since, and a recent Pew
survey found that more than one in five Americans still
use X formerly Twitter. While the competitors that we talked
(10:56):
about a lot, things like Threads and Blue Sky, they
remain comparabletively bit players in this space. So despite all
the talk about it, they do remain a pretty hasty,
you know, force in the world of social media.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Mike, thank you, we'll talk again. Always, great stuff. I
have a good day, you too, take care, Happy Thanksgiving.
That's what you're supposed to say, isn't it. That's what
they tell me.
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