Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.
In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”
“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)
RFK Jr. said he regularly “gets manipulated by AI.”
While Carroll has no particular public profile on AI, his persona tracks with the campaign’s focus on tech figures and influencers as it courts a young, male, and extremely online audience. When opening the panel on the “perils and promise of AI,” Carroll introduced himself as “just a regular guy who likes to ask questions.” Indeed, the conspiracy-minded podcaster and videomaker didn’t say much aside from asking questions of the panelists: Kennedy, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, Gmail-creator Paul Buchheit, and Creon Levit, a former NASA scientist who has appeared on the heterodox podcast circuit.
The discussion broke little ground. The group agreed that AI represented an exciting and complex new frontier. Kennedy, despite having admitted his own personal AI-enabled disinformation crisis, downplayed concerns that AI technology would be broadly used to misinform.
