US President Donald Trump is angry that more people are not joining his move to rebrand artificial intelligence as super intelligence.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump criticised The Wall Street Journal, which, along with almost everyone else has kept calling the technology artificial intelligence, or AI for short.
"When will The Wall Street Journal start calling artificial intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (super intelligence), the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be," he posted on social media.
Mr Trump said his administration would soon "be officially banning the term 'AI/artificial intelligence,' in all relevant documents".
Last month, as polls showed US residents have an increasingly negative view of AI due to fears of job losses, data centres and environmental concerns, Mr Trump signed an executive order that sought to force the US federal government to use the phrase "super intelligence".
Several US agencies responded and promised to begin using SI instead of AI, but most technology companies, experts, analysts, media outlets and governments outside the US have kept using the term AI.
During an event in Washington organised by the White House in early October, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang kept correcting himself while mentioning AI.
“As you know we want to advance AI – I'm sorry, I mean SI. I'm going to get good at this,” he said.
In recent weeks, the International Monetary Fund also told Reuters that it would not be changing what it calls AI, despite requests from the White House.
Semantic origin and confusion
AI research, which stretches back decades, already has a long list of established phrases.
Shortly after Mr Trump initially announced the name several months ago, technology experts said the phrase “AI super intelligence” 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 pass 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 he also had 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.”
