Democrats should own the AI backlash

Dan Cluchey is a speechwriter with Fenway Strategies and a former senior presidential speechwriter to President Joe Biden.

The most important — and most heartening — viral video clip in recent memory was a snippet of a commencement speech at the University of Central Florida. The speaker, a member of the generic executive set often called upon to address graduates, begins to laud artificial intelligence as “the next Industrial Revolution.” The audience, a sea of young arts and humanities majors, boos mercilessly in return. It happened again a week later at the University of Arizona. And but for the hasty rewriting of a thousand graduation spiels, it could have happened just about anywhere.

For the Democratic Party, those boos should be a clarion call. As the party prepares to redefine itself outside the shadow of Donald Trump — for the first time in a decade — it can start by standing up for every American concerned about the damage AI might bring upon their lives and livelihoods.

Maybe AI will deliver a brighter future for all. But Americans are rightly skeptical of that view, with only 26 percent expressing a positive opinion of the technology in a recent NBC News survey. More and more, there are signs of a backlash to the uncontrolled AI burn that tech companies have sparked — and that the Trump administration has openly abetted through its failure to push for responsible guardrails. Workers in countless fields are marking the days until the boss no longer needs them. Parents are watching their kids’ minds get dimmed by AI’s cheat-code to discovery. Communities are pushing back against an onrush of data centers that spike their energy bills and sap their natural resources. That 26 percent favorability may turn out to be a high-water mark.

Where does the Democratic Party come in? When the range of projected outcomes is as ludicrous as AI’s — spanning roughly from “infinite economic growth” to ”the evaporation of every job” — it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that AI is a human invention. Where AI stands today is the product of choices made by a remarkably small number of people in industry and government. Where it goes tomorrow will be the product of people’s choices as well.

Whether those world-altering choices continue to rest with the few, or whether all of us get a say in how our future is being written, may very well emerge as the defining question of modern human history. The Democratic Party should define itself as the party that answers it on the side of the people.

For a party constantly at war with itself over issues of identity and ideology, reining in AI could be the stance that unites all factions. Fighting for freedom from tech tyranny is a natural posture for Democrats, bridging each of the pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-human-dignity, and anti-monopoly impulses that have defined the party at its best. It’s a future-facing cause that blue dogs and democratic socialists could stake out with equal credibility — and the kind of popular, unabashed branding that Democrats sorely need.

There are mountains of ideas about how best to build safeguards around AI, so that it spends more time curing cancer and less time writing your kid’s English homework. But here’s a big one that I haven’t heard anyone put forward yet — an attention-grabbing proposal any Democratic candidate could run on to help put the winning issue of AI regulation at the center of the discourse, where it belongs.

The next Democratic administration should vow to create a Cabinet-level Department of Technology, a single entity charged with overseeing American tech companies, building and enforcing guardrails, and shepherding innovation responsibly so that it serves the people’s interests. Rather than a scattershot response to Silicon Valley’s unchecked ambitions for the country — spread across subagencies and without much muscle or money — Americans who feel helpless in the face of the AI onslaught deserve a champion with real teeth.

Our present tech overlords will hate this idea — a good thing on the merits and even better on the politics. And of course, there will be endless details to debate about how best to design a new transparency, safety, and public interest regime at the federal level. But what matters most right now is that Democrats answer the boos of those students and declare with one voice that we’re going to fight, with ideas as big as the threat, to make it right.