I found Cameron Berg’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal quite amusing. According to Berg, artificial-intelligence systems developed in China must pass an ideological test before they are released publicly. A Cybersecurity Law introduced earlier this year is said to have identified 31 risks, with “incitement to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system” ranked as the gravest danger.

Berg mentioned efforts the Chinese authorities make to tightly control the information used to train large language models (LLMs) in China. The goal, apparently, is to influence the views that the models express. Tencent, a Chinese technology company, reportedly created a chatbot called BabyQ that turned out to be ideologically illiterate. Berg says that when BabyQ was asked whether it loved the Communist Party, it replied that it did not. That caused great consternation and the chatbot was quietly taken out of circulation. I was particularly amused by the case of Microsoft’s Xiaobing chatbot, which was also designed for Chinese platforms. When asked about its opinion of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” slogan, Xiaobing replied that its dream was moving to the U.S. It was booted from circulation for those heretical thoughts.

The Xiaobing deactivation is said to have occurred in the summer of 2017. It was early in President Trump’s first term, and America and the rest of the world were still coming to terms with the improbable victory that took Mr. Trump to the White House. In the lead up to that election, some Americans said that if candidate Trump won, they would emigrate. Later reports indicated that not many people followed through after he became president.

It has been a different story in the second Trump administration. At least 180,000 U.S. citizens are estimated to have emigrated from the U.S. in 2025. The reasons for the departures are many. They include high cost of living and rising gun violence in America. A large and growing number of Americans are pointing specifically to President Trump’s policies, and his governing style, as sources of their unhappiness. This group says that deepening political polarization is a big driver of their decision to pack up and leave.

Increasingly, it appears that the rest of the world is also losing its appetite for life in America. In decades past, the U.S. was the one country that people from everywhere wanted to come to. But in the last year, judging by what I read and hear, a lot of people think that America has become an unattractive place to live, or even visit.

The world looks and feels a lot different now than it did in 2017 when Mr. Xiaobing harbored his aspiration to move to America. If he were alive today, I wonder if he would still have that dream.