President Donald Trump has waded into the AI debate with a lexical proclamation: AI shouldn’t be called AI.
“Many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence,” he began in a post on his social media site Truth Social on Saturday, seemingly apropos of nothing.
“A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”
Today Trump used an address at the United Nations to make the term official.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to artificial,” he said. “So it’s super intelligence.”
It’s quintessential Trump: he loves assigning new names to things — often the derogative kind, directed at his political foes — and indulging in these kinds of meaningless digressions, entertaining apparently whatever whim pops into his head. Do “many people” actually think the term “artificial intelligence” is “inaccurate,” or “inelegant”? If they do, it’s because it anthropomorphizes something that isn’t intelligent — not, as Trump presumes, because it’s actually a form of super-duper-hyper-mega intelligence.
It could be that Trump has fully bought into the artificial superintelligence narrative pushed by Silicon Valley figures — a borderline cult-like belief that humankind is well on its way to building a god-like machine that could usher in utopian benefits or destroy humanity. The AI existential risk narrative has caught fire recently, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an AI slowdown after a former researcher at the company accused the AI industry of “gambling with our lives.”
Trump, let’s not forget, is also addicted to AI slop, using it to vomit out AI-generated depictions of himself as a divine being and even a fighter pilot strafing protestors with diarrhea. More nefariously, he’s used it to generate fake depictions of the US triumphing in the war against Iran. For a man obsessed with lying to reshape reality in his favor, AI probably does seem like a superintelligent gift from the heavens.
Trump isn’t the first figure in his administration to suggest an eyebrow-raising alternative term for AI. Last year, his secretary of education Linda McMahon repeatedly referred to the tech as “A1” — like the brand of steak sauce — during an event.
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