If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company’s keynote event last week, in which that assistant was revealed as part of a new system called GPT-4o, Altman reached out to Johansson’s team, urging the actor to reconsider. Johansson and Altman allegedly never spoke, and Johansson allegedly never granted OpenAI permission to use her voice. Nevertheless, the company debuted Sky two days later—a program with a voice many believed was alarmingly similar to Johansson’s.

Johansson told NPR that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” In response, Altman issued a statement denying that the company had cloned her voice and saying that it had already cast a different voice actor before reaching out to Johansson. (I’d encourage you to listen for yourself.) Curiously, Altman said that OpenAI would take down Sky’s voice from its platform “out of respect” for Johansson. This is a messy situation for OpenAI, complicated by Altman’s own social-media posts. On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.

On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.

Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary. Last summer, my colleague Ross Andersen described Altman’s ambitions thusly:

As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state. Altman, of course, has testified before Congress, urging lawmakers to regulate the technology while also stressing that “the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks.” Still, the message is clear: The future is coming, and you ought to let us be the ones to build it.

Other OpenAI employees have offered a less gracious vision. In a video posted last fall on YouTube by a group of effective altruists in the Netherlands, three OpenAI employees answered questions about the future of the technology. In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.” Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.” (There is no evidence to suggest that the wealth will be evenly distributed.)

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.

You can see this dynamic playing out in OpenAI’s content-licensing agreements, which it has struck with platforms such as Reddit and news organizations such as Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith. Recently, a tech executive I spoke with compared these types of agreements to a hostage situation, suggesting they believe that AI companies will find ways to scrape publishers’ websites anyhow, if they don’t comply. Best to get a paltry fee out of them while you can, the person argued.

The Johansson accusations only compound (and, if true, validate) these suspicions. Altman’s alleged reasoning for commissioning Johansson’s voice was that her familiar timbre might be “comforting to people” who find AI assistants off-putting. Her likeness would have been less about a particular voice-bot aesthetic and more of an adoption hack or a recruitment tool for a technology that many people didn’t ask for, and seem uneasy about. Here, again, is the logic of OpenAI at work. It follows that the company would plow ahead, consent be damned, simply because it might believe the stakes are too high to pivot or wait. When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply.

Hubris and entitlement are inherent in the development of any transformative technology. A small group of people needs to feel confident enough in its vision to bring it into the world and ask the rest of us to adapt. But generative AI stretches this dynamic to the point of absurdity. It is a technology that requires a mindset of manifest destiny, of dominion and conquest. It’s not stealing to build the future if you believe it has belonged to you all along.

At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand,  it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.

That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (IT’S A LANDSLIDE! TRUMP WINS!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.

Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

[David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator “on day one”]

This election cycle has seen a slew of stories about how the Trump campaign is far more professionally run and regimented than in 2016 and 2020. That appears to be true, but only in a limited sense. Any competent campaign would have vetted such a video before it reposted it in order to avoid just this kind of mess. But Trump and his team can’t or won’t bother to look carefully at what he (or his staff) reposts on social media, and never have. In 2016, he posted an anti-Semitic meme with a Star of David and then tried to convince people it was a “sheriff’s star.” In 2017, he posted a GIF that showed him body-slamming CNN, created by a Reddit user who, whaddya know, also posted lots of anti-Semitic material. Earlier this year, a brief controversy broke out when Trump posted a video of a convoy of trucks decked out in pro-Trump swag, including an image of a bound and tied Joe Biden on one truck’s tailgate.

Despite having served as president for four years, and despite being a gifted political messenger, Trump has never grasped—or perhaps never cared—that sloppy words from someone in his position can be hugely consequential, and he resists guardrails that would protect him.

[Read: If Trump wins]

Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)

The Biden campaign quickly pounced on the situation. “Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a ‘UNIFIED REICH,’ echoing Nazi Germany,” its official account posted on X. The Biden campaign is not stupid, which means both that it should have figured out the real origin of the post (and may well have) and also that it was not going to let an opportunity to savage its opponent pass by.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashana message to American Jews]

Biden’s team has been taking a more aggressive approach to Trump as the election nears. After years of elliptically referring to his “predecessor,” the president has begun naming Trump in attacks. The rest of his apparatus is also attacking Trump, trying to remind voters of the reasons they rejected him in 2020. In this case, the Biden campaign seems to have succeeded in manufacturing a controversy. Every major outlet has a headline this morning about the video (a representative example from The Washington Post: “Trump’s Truth Social Account Shares Video Referencing ‘Unified Reich’). These stories are not untruthful—he did share the video—but they are also a little misleading, though perhaps unintentionally so.

Whether the backlash to the video helps Biden beat Trump in November is anybody’s guess. Trump’s critics debate whether it is more effective to attack Trump as a threat to democracy, criticize his unpopular policy ideas, paint him as corrupt, or focus on Biden’s positive accomplishments. The incident shows exactly why Trump was so bad at being president. It probably doesn’t tell us anything new about Trump’s feelings regarding Hitler that we didn’t already know. The bizarre thing is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.