In response to the massive blowback it received for taking down a webpage about famed baseball player Jackie Robinson, Pentagon officials admitted that they're using AI to carry out their purge of all "DEI" content in the military.
On Thursday, Pentagon press secretary Sean Parnell posted a video on X to provide "clarity" about why Robinson, a legendary figure who was the first to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and an Army veteran who served during World War II, came into the crosshairs of the Trump administration's initiative to remove any references deemed too focused on diversity from official military websites and communications.
Rather than fessing up to the racist snafu, Parnell suggested that artificial intelligence was at fault.
"Because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed," Parnell said in the video. "We want to be very, very clear, history is not DEI."
"When content is either mistakenly removed or if it's maliciously removed," Parnell emphasized strikingly, "we continue to work quickly to restore it."
The controversy is the latest to stem from president Donald Trump's executive order directing the Department of Defense to eliminate military DEI initiatives and to excise any content that highlights race and gender. The saga began Wednesday when observers realized that a brief bio about Robinson's life suddenly returned a "Page Not Found" error with a URL containing the word "DEI."
That sparked an explosion of outrage on social media so vociferous that not even the most hardline anti-woke crusaders in the administration could ignore it. Stepping up to the task, DoD public affairs official John Ullyot made a statement that didn't address whether the takedown of Robinson's biography was a mistake, and instead ranted about "Woke cultural Marxism."
That only fanned the flames, and the backlash mounted. On Thursday, Ullyot was removed from his role, the Washington Post reported. The Robinson article has now been restored.
The controversy is also emblematic of the Trump administration's eager adoption of AI to carry out its blitzkrieg of the federal government. Lackeys at Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency have fed sensitive government employee and financial data into an AI model, while using a another AI tool to assess the emails Musk demanded from all federal employees to justify keeping their jobs. DOGE is also training a custom AI chatbot to sift through government contracts and other expenditures. Meanwhile, the US Army is using an AI model called "CamoGPT" to remove DEI references in training materials.
The use of the technology is nefarious in these contexts for a number of reasons, not least of all because it can be used to take the blame off Trump's anti-woke enforcers when they get caught doing something beyond the pale even by their standards. Since the tech works sweepingly and automatically, vast swathes of content can be wiped out on a moment's notice, and it's only in the exceptional cases like this one that there's enough attention to undo the damage.
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