Kathrine Frich
He also signed an executive order last month that everyone is ignoring.
Rebranding a household word is never an easy task.
Even when the person asking holds the highest office in the land, everyday habits are stubbornly hard to break.
Now, a prominent leader is finding out that even his closest media allies are refusing to update their dictionaries.
A new tech ban
According to HuffPost, President Donald Trump is trying to wipe out the phrase artificial intelligence and replace it with his own favourite label, “super intelligence.”
On Tuesday, he went a step further by declaring that he would be “BANNING” the standard term altogether, branding it a “very bad and inaccurate name.”
How the White House plans to enforce a vocabulary ban without clashing with First Amendment free speech protections remains a mystery. Still, the president has been pushing the “SI” label hard since September.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump warned that his administration would view anyone still saying AI as “THE ENEMY.”
He also signed an executive order last month to back the rebrand, even though tech researchers already use “super intelligence” to describe a theoretical machine mind that outsmarts humans. On top of that, HuffPost notes that Trump claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping prefers saying “SI” just “like almost everyone else.”
Fox hosts ignore him
Despite the tough talk, a Wednesday study from Media Matters for America found that conservative networks are mostly shrugging off the order.
Outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and Newsmax “that typically carry the president’s water have resisted his demand that they revise their vocabularies,” the watchdog group reported.
On the Fox News website, articles still sit under a hub titled “Understanding Artificial Intelligence.” And less than five minutes after Media Matters released its findings, Fox anchor Harris Faulkner said AI on air while previewing a story about Stanford University sharing a computer-generated marching band photo.
According to Media Matters, fellow Fox hosts Laura Ingraham and Bret Baier, who played a round of golf with the president last month, also continue to “run segments on ‘AI’” during their broadcasts.
Only a handful of figures have adopted the new phrasing on air, including Fox presenter Jesse Watters and the president’s daughter-in-law, former Republican National Committee chair Lara Trump.
