Kathrine Frich
Enforcing a law against everyday words raises obvious legal headaches.
Buzzwords pop up everywhere in modern life, from office chats to the evening news.
Once a catchy phrase takes hold in our daily vocabulary, getting people to drop it is nearly impossible.
Now, one powerful leader thinks an official order can wipe a huge tech term right off the map.
War on two words
US President Donald Trump is weighing up drastic action to stop people from saying “artificial intelligence” or “AI”, HuffPost reported. Instead, he wants everyone to adopt his favourite replacement phrase, “super intelligence”.
On Tuesday, the president used his Truth Social platform to lash out at The Wall Street Journal. He complained that the newspaper kept printing the standard tech terms rather than following his lead, and he vowed to ban the old wording altogether.
This push started last month. According to HuffPost, the president wants to rebrand the technology just like he already renamed Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, alongside a similar change he is eyeing for the state of New Mexico.
First Amendment questions
Enforcing a rule against everyday words raises obvious legal headaches. When HuffPost asked the White House what punishments might await anyone caught saying “AI” instead of “Super Intelligence”, officials did not reply right away.
Meanwhile, news outlet Mediaite asked the administration how the government could outlaw a phrase when the First Amendment protects free speech. The White House answered with a blunt four-word reply: “Refer to the truth.”
Tech experts push back
Actual computer scientists are far from impressed by the proposed rebrand. Earlier this month, University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as “the Godfather of A.I.”, told The Guardian that the president’s fixation on “superintelligence” proves he knows “almost nothing” about the field.
“He’s taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,” Hinton told The Guardian. “‘Superintelligence’ means ‘smarter than people,’ and has been around for at least 20 years. It’s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we’re going to call AI ‘superintelligence’. You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.”
Other analysts think the new label could even scare the public.
Darrell West, a tech policy researcher at the Brookings Institution, told HuffPost earlier this month that the word sounds “like ‘The Terminator,’” adding that he “doesn’t think changing the word is going to lead to greater reassurance.”
