Trump tells Logan Paul he used AI to ‘so beautifully’ rewrite a speech

Donald Trump has said he used a speech generated by artificial intelligence (AI) after being impressed by the content.

The former US president, whose oratory is noted for its rambling, off-the-cuff style but also for its demagoguery, made the claim in an interview with Logan Paul’s podcast in which he lauded AI as “a superpower” but also warned of its potential dangers.

He said the rewritten speech came during a meeting with one of the industry’s “top people”, whom he did not identify.

“I had a speech rewritten by AI out there, one of the top people,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna make a speech? Yeah?’ He goes, click, click, click, and like, 15 seconds later, he shows me my speech that’s written that’s great, so beautifully. I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.” Trump did not say at what event he had used the AI-generated speech.

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He predicted that AI’s oratorical gifts could sound the death knell for speech writers, long a part of Washington’s political landscape.

“One industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters,” he said. I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly, a matter of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary.”

Asked what he said to his speech writer, Trump jokingly responded, “You’re fired,” a line associated with The Apprentice, the TV reality show that helped propel his political rise.

Trump, the Republican presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, also acknowledged that AI had dangers, especially in regard to deepfakes. He warned of an imaginary situation where a faked voice warned a foreign power that a US nuclear attack was being launched, possibly triggering a retaliatory strike.

“If you’re the president of the United States, and you announced that 13 missiles have been sent to, let’s not use the name of a country,” he said. “We have just sent 13 nuclear missiles heading to somewhere, and they will hit their targets in 12 minutes and 59 seconds, and you’re that country.”

He said he had asked the entrepreneur Elon Musk – referring to him by his first name – if Russia or China would be able to identify that the attack warning was fake and was told that they would have to use a code to check its veracity.

“Who the hell’s going to check. You got, like, 12 minutes – let’s check the code,” he said. “So what do they do when they see this? They have maybe a counterattack. It’s so dangerous in that way.”