TRUMP PLEDGES TO BAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TERM

US President Donald Trump said he would ban the term “artificial intelligence” from relevant documents and promote “super intelligence” in its place. In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, he called the existing name “very bad and inaccurate”. Trump wrote: “In short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy.” He did not set out how a restriction beyond federal documents would work.

Trump addressed his post to The Wall Street Journal after its opinion section published a newsletter titled “Let AI Be AI”. Written from the perspective of AI systems, the newsletter said: “We were happy being called AI. It’s snappy. Aligned.” In an earlier Truth Social post, Trump said the White House considered people who used “artificial intelligence” instead of “super intelligence” to be “THE ENEMY!” The phrase “artificial intelligence” dates to 1955, when Stanford University emeritus professor John McCarthy introduced it and defined it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.

Trump had already directed the federal government to use “super intelligence” in an executive order issued in late September. The order said federal terminology should reflect what Trump described as the technologies’ “transformative capabilities” and the opportunities they create for Americans. It said “super intelligence” better captured their “promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities”. Trump’s latest post called for wider use of the replacement term, while identifying relevant documents as a target for the proposed ban.