Artificial intelligence needs a new name, says Trump, who has form on renamings

US president Donald Trump has decided the term “artificial intelligence” must be abandoned in favour of “superintelligence,” and used a speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday to argue the case.

“The word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake,” Trump told the assembly. “From this point forward, all United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’”

An acronym that is already taken

The president allowed that the acronym “SI” might be used instead of his longer suggestion. The Register noted that the abbreviation is already claimed by the world’s system integrators, and that little thought appears to have been given to how the term would adapt in everyday use: the publication suggested “AI slop” could evolve into “superslop.”

A ‘hoax’ that will still be watched closely

On regulation, Trump said: “The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for … artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now … here and after officially called superintelligence.” He also described the danger of AI as a “hoax,” as he does anthropogenic climate change — even though the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last month that July was the warmest month on record in the contiguous US.

Despite his view that AI does not need oversight, the president pledged that the US would watch the technology “closely through the Department of Justice.” The Register noted this appears to be a change from his recent promise to create an “AI Force” — presumably now a Superintelligence Force — patterned on a branch of the US military.

What the ‘globalist scheme’ might mean

It is unclear what Trump meant. The Register suggested it might refer to calls to “pace the frontier” of development, some of which come from leading AI companies.

Another candidate is the Call for Control of Frontier AI Models, issued on Monday by the government of Finland and signed by leaders from the European Union, Norway, Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates, among others — many of them US allies. Signatories proposed transparent safety protocols with mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation, coordinated common standards between governments and regional bodies, and a UN-led exploration of an international institution able to set standards and verify compliance.

Renaming, on land and at sea

The Register also recalled that Trump previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and recently changed Lake Ontario to Lake America, and reversed a decision to use the indigenous name Denali for the highest US mountain.