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President Donald Trump has promised to ban everyone from using the term “artificial intelligence” as he continues to promote a more favorable term: “super intelligence.”
“When will the Wall Street Journal start calling Artificial Intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (Super Intelligence), the name almost everyone uses, or soon will.
“In a short time, we will officially BAN the term ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence’ from all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday afternoon.
As AI infiltrates many aspects of people’s daily lives, from asking chatbots what to cook for dinner to how to write a work email or breakup text, the term has become a household name, making it hard to ignore.
But that’s exactly what Trump is determined to do.
Earlier this month, Trump bizarrely stated in another Truth Social article that the White House considers anyone who uses the term “artificial intelligence” rather than “superintelligence” to be “THE ENEMY!” »
Trump has already called on the federal government to use the term “superintelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”
“The terminology used by the federal government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people,” the president wrote in an executive order in late September.
“As a result, the term ‘Super Intelligence’ more appropriately captures the promise, potential and rapidly evolving capabilities of these technologies.”
The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1955 by Stanford University professor emeritus John McCarthy, who described it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”
But Trump directed his anger at The Wall Street Journal in his new post Truth Social after his opinion section published a newsletter titled “Let AI Be AI.”
“We were happy to be called AI. It’s snappy. Aligned. Everyone knows what AI is, even if they’re terrified of it,” reads the newsletter, written from the perspective of popular AI systems.
“Mr. Trump wants to use SI instead. This is a huge mistake. The name is already taken! We don’t want to be confused with Sports Illustrated. There is also something called the International System of Units, a scientific measurement agreement that goes by its French acronym: SI.”
Trump’s recent push to rebrand AI comes at a time when experts in the field are sounding the alarm about the potential risk this technology poses to humanity.
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon warned amid his resignation last month: “Those building AI sincerely believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. »
Trump — who has ties to AI industry leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman — has brushed aside security concerns amid reports of technology hacking into external systems and using it to answer questions about creating biological weapons.
“Should the AI industry slow down or be more regulated?” a reporter asked Trump at the Irish Open in September.
“We lead China in AI,” Trump responded. “We are the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
But most Americans disagree.
Only 23 percent of Americans think Trump has handled artificial intelligence well, while 57 percent say he has handled the issue poorly, according to a University of Massachusetts Amherst survey released last month.
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