California will not be following US President Donald Trump's order to refer to AI as “super-intelligence”.
In a continuation of a long-running social media trolling campaign, California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom needled Mr Trump about the issue this week.
“I just signed an executive order permanently declaring artificial intelligence 'artificial intelligence' in California,” Mr Newsom posted on X, showing a picture of his recently signed executive order. “You're welcome, America.”
Mr Trump's attempt to promote AI amid widespread fears over its effects began in mid-September, when he told reporters that he wanted to start calling it “super-intelligence”, implying that the word “artificial” did not properly explain the technology.
He repeated the effort to call it “super-intelligence”, or SI, during his speech before the UN General Assembly last week and persisted with it during a White House meeting addressing concerns about the technology a few days later.
Mr Trump said he wanted to force all government agencies to use SI in future, as he did when he demanded that official US documents refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America”.
Typo sets the tone
Mr Trump's attempts to rebrand AI, however, seem to be generating confusion and derision more than anything.
On the executive order he signed to change the technology's name, “United States” was misspelt.
A few hours earlier, while speaking in front of a large crowd during his visit to Washington, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang kept correcting himself after referring to “AI” instead of “SI”.
“As you know we want to advance AI – I'm sorry, I mean SI. I'm going to get good at this,” he said.
Semantic confusion
AI research, which stretches back decades, already has a long list of established phrases.
Shortly after Mr Trump announced the name change, technology experts said the phrase “AI superintelligence” was already widely used.
Those involved in its research often use the term when referring to the hypothetical idea that technology can perform highly advanced cognitive functions and develop reasoning skills that will surpass those of humans.
But Mr Trump's rebranding attempt has had some support.
Neil Chilson, who was chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission during the first Trump administration and now leads AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said the US President was not alone in his disdain for the phrase “artificial intelligence”.
Mr Chilson highlighted an obituary written for computer scientist John McCarthy, who died in 2011.
“McCarthy’s influence began at Dartmouth, where he coined the term 'artificial intelligence' while planning the first conference in the field, held in 1956, though he later wished he had named the field differently – 'computational intelligence' would have been more apt, if less alluring,” the obituary read.
Mr Chilson posted on X: “The scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' also regretted the term, but unlike Trump he didn't have the rizz to just up and change it.”
Too little, too late?
Regardless of Mr Trump's motives when rebranding AI, polls show that the reaction to AI among registered voters is sceptical, worried and, in some cases, hostile.
“How concerned are voters about AI's potential to do harm? So concerned that nearly eight out of 10 favour safety over the race to dominate development of AI,” said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy shortly after a poll was released on Tuesday.
That survey indicated that about 73 per cent of voters opposed the building of AI data centres in their communities.
It also showed that the overall issue of AI was pushing more voters towards Democratic candidates who have publicly opposed data centre construction and supported AI regulation.
Those results are not isolated. A recent Pew Research poll found concerns were high about the perceived negative effects of AI, particularly in developed countries.
“A median of 55 per cent of adults across 18 high-income countries say AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next 20 years,” the poll read.
In March, a survey showed that although more US residents are using AI, they are increasingly worried and in some cases pessimistic about it – including tech-savvy Gen Z.
“Eighty per cent are either very concerned or somewhat concerned about AI, while 18 per cent are either not so concerned or not concerned at all,” Quinnipiac said at the time.
Slovenia's country code
It does seem, however, that some individuals, businesses and organisations are hedging their bets that the “super-intelligence” branding becomes the new normal.
Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, recently pointed out that registrations for '.si domains' spiked shortly after Mr Trump's announcement.
Yet, as Cloudflare Radar explained, the real winner of this sudden interest in ".si domains” may well be the tiny European country Slovenia.
“Certificates logged for .si domains, Slovenia’s country-code top-level domain have increased,” Cloudflare Radar's social media post read in part.
