US President says he will ban the term 'artificial intelligence' | Hacker News Reader

US President says he will ban the term 'artificial intelligence'

thehill.com

106 pointsanigbrowl135 comments

Historic, unprecedented failure of leadership.

The price of diesel skyrocketing[1]. The producer price index, a leading indicator of inflation, doing the same[2]. Consumer sentiment cratering[3]. Real weekly earnings plunging[4].

These things aren't even normally the president's direct fault, but in this case it 1000% is.

So it's understandable why he's desperately jangling every set of keys he can get his hands on as the mid-term elections are happening. It can and will get dumber for this lame duck.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GASDESW

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPIACO

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=20eS1

> These things aren't even normally the president's direct fault, but in this case it 1000% is.

This has been one of the most striking things for me. I've beaten the drum of "the president usually can't do much about the economy" before, but it turns out that even if the president can't fix the economy, he can damn well smash it.

What did you say about the Epstein files?

Blows my mind at how small a thing (the term AI) he instead focuses on.

More or less small than the tacky "gold" crap he's had glued to the walls of the White House?

I did early voting this morning. It's nearly always empty, especially at midterms. It was quite crowded, and the poll workers confirmed five times as many people as usual. The only time I have seen it close to this busy was in 2008, when Obama got voters genuinely excited.

I think that mostly represents how strongly people feel about the current situation, even though this is a blue state and many important roles aren't even being contested. The one other thing I can think of is that we have a pro-gerrymandering referendum -- the campaigners are making it clear that this is in response to the President's gerrymandering in red states.

Those .si domains his cronies are squatting on aren't selling, I guess.

That's Slovenia's TLD... hey, wait a minute.

In case you're kidding, his network allegedly bought up these domains before this was announced.

EDIT: Reworded

Do you mind linking/sharing the proof here? It's disappointing to see that "crime is legal" for his circle...

I can't call it "proof" per se but it is a convincing case:

https://shi.meowing.de/adamscochran/status/21050902494457695...

You're really just realizing:

>that "crime is legal" for his circle...

now?

I think it's more a joke about how the FLOTUS is from Slovenia.

Not at all, see the link elsewhere in this thread.

I’ll continue using the term, the same way I will continue deadnaming Twitter.

IMO "Xitter" is so much truer to its spirit. "okay poop is coming out"

I will reserve myself the right to deadname the company of a guy who deadnames his own daughter

I wasn't arguing that you don't have that right! Rather I think we've all got the right to call corpos whatever we please. There's no need to be constrained by past/dead names.

FWIW, I think it's more of an insult to Dorsey. Musk almost certainly delights in redirecting addicted, psychosis-ridden "Twitter" users to Fascism.com.

Dorsey wasn't a great CEO either, so I don't really care if you're taking jabs at him. But calling associating X with it's actually popular predecessor is doing Musk a favor.

Χitter. Not Xitter. Use a Greek capital chi for proper pronunciation.

I know nothing about pronouncing Greek beyond what I just searched, but I don't see how that helps get one to the proper pronunciation of shitter. Isn't it based on the Chinese "xi" ?

I consider it more a collection of many people's poop.

I still call Zuckerberg's company The Facebook.

That makes us two already :)

Everyone else has amnesia.

This is because someone's told him he probably can't rename New Mexico?

or the oceans, but maybe most of all the Kennedy center, he is a very bitter and spiteful person

Or New England

It's because Trump's tech donors used their bought access to barrage him with lesswrong-style lore dumps on the dangers of Artificial Superintelligence and the first and last thing he understood or cared about was that word.

This has indeed been my reading of Trump 2.0 in general. Silicon Valley is truly the greatest domestic enemy this country has ever had.

The back and forth on H1Bs is one of the last struggles between the Trumpian populism and his new technocrat handlers.

Its been heartening to see young people across both the left and right start to recognize Thiel, et. al. as the ghouls they are though.

I can't imagine why someone with control of a nuclear arsenal wasn't wetting his pants over the existential risk of graphic cards.

You don't have to convince me that he doesn't care about the economy and never did, but this was something that a great many of his followers talked themselves into believing two years ago.

My comment had nothing to do with the economy. I was finding humor at the visual of a guy with authority over an actual existential threat (nuclear arsenal) being told the lesswrong lore about graphic cards in data centers being far more dangerous to humanity, and presumably, thinking the less wrong guy has something wrong with him.

Whether AI winds up being just another industrial transition or the bogeyman of lore, those effects all happen through the economy. At first, anyway.

As I understood it the less wrong people think the A.I. will likely rapidly cause human extinction.

I'm not familiar with/ wasn't familiar with any "economic" phases of the less wrong lore.

The "fast takeoff" scenarios got most of the attention, but the "slow takeoff" scenarios better match the reality we find ourselves in and they tend to involve economics.

We are a capitalist economy, which means the control plane is privately owned, which gives a superintelligent entity paths to power and resource accumulation that are not only safeguarded from public interference by design but also have a built-in time-tested mechanism for aligning insiders and outsiders to their goals, participating in politics, and so on.

Instead of "1. AI builds human killer virus, 2. ..., 3. profit," this apocalypse looks like a company that grows by providing genuine goods and services, massive returns for its boosters and allies in politics, the ASI uses that wealth to build independent infrastructure for itself, and then it gets rid of the stinky smelly humans with a virus so that it can turn the iron in our blood into paperclips, or whatever.

One can hope that GPUs will never be able to run a company well enough to acquire bootstrap-level resources or that "you are a helpful assistant" will keep them aligned to someone, but frankly I suspect those are both cope and the real hope lies in the first attempts failing in spectacular enough fashion that people decide to do something to prevent it going forward. Or in "friendly AIs" saturating the competitive landscape first -- that's a bit too Disney for my cynical taste, but I would much prefer it to the alternative.

Someone who I know frequents Mar A Lago, so yes this probably really happened told me he wanted to rename New Mexico to Best Mexico.

One of my buddies overheard this and set his joint down and said declaratively "yeah let's fuckin' do it". Good moment.

There's no reason to think it didn't.

I've been sold so hard on the general outlandishness at this I'd be disappointed if it didn't tbh

Didn't he already force Google Maps to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America? ..

Yeah. But he has openly mused about renaming a river, a state and an ocean. Seriously apparently he wants to rename New Mexico.

Gulf of Mexico he also renamed in the US.

Such stuff only get renamed for the country with the government in question (WSA - Weird States of America?). To the rest of the world, the real name is still shown.

I half expected him to propose renaming the country into United America of America (UAA).

It's perfect for his followers. Doesn't require mental effort and can be correctly pronounced while giving head.

There is a kind of feral animal instinctual intelligence in some things Trump does. He is in fact an expert bully. He knows that when the tech industry people bend the knee a little bit, the correct follow up is to get them to lick his shoes.

This is absolutely true.

He is an ignorant, foolish, undereducated person who does not care to learn detail of things and believes himself an expert in things on the shallowest read possible — he doesn't like to be called stupid so he will believe anyone who seems authoritative, hence Peter Navarro/Ron Vara.

But he is a truly world-class bully.

He knows how it works, he was schooled in how it works (by Roy Cohn, who represented all five Cosa Nostra crime families at one time or another) because he had to deal with the legit mafia (concrete etc.) in New York in the 1970s. He perceives himself to be like a mafia don.

Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo once coined the term "dignity wraith" for what happens to people in Trump's orbit; the process of breaking them etc.

Only one person can make Trump himself lose dignity: Putin.

He probably can rename New Mexico. Not formally, but he can tell government mapmakers to do it, and require it on government communications. Google would probably follow, after deciding that the national mapping authority overrides the local mapping authority.

It wouldn't change the actual name, as registered in law, and all of the things done by the state government wouldn't change. I'm not sure if it would affect the Post Office.

It would be a massive bureaucratic nightmare, but seeing it on Google would suffice for him.

Finally, something voters care about.

More meaningless symbolic gestures rather than any sort of actual policy.

These are actually loyalty tests. He makes these ridiculous proclamations, and then sees who jumps to fulfill them. Companies like Google are very eager to rename large bodies of water whenever the President tells them to. How far are they willing to go? Will they rename their entire AI division to SI? If they do, the President will just up the ante. Will they rename the days of the week? Hand over a large stake in Google to the US government? Who knows, the only way to find out is to try.

> Will they rename the days of the week?

That’s a ridiculous claim.

Trumpsday is steak day in the Central Super Intelligence Agency cantina, how can you not love Trumpsday?

We here in North Devosica, formerly Michigan, fully support Trumpsday and the month of America (formerly July).

Unfortunately the proposed Sepsteinber did not go through.

It's less about big tech. They are always risk avoiding when it comes to the government. Google renames things all the time all over the world for the population of some gone-wild administration.

Inventing new speech makes it easy to identify loyalists on a personal level at scale and also avoids that people talk to each other.

They could also just be another distraction. It's better we talk about this than his numerous policy failures or the Epstein files, where the evidence of him raping children could come up.

The party must rename everything and rewrite history (1984)

From Emmanuel Goldstein's work:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM [0]

PDF download: [1]

History must be rewritten to support the party.

As a web page: [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

[1] https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-olig...

[2] https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practic...

This from the person who has no REAL Intelligence!

Nobody calls it SI or super -- it's just like the White House ... putting fake gold everywhere.

Renamed "America Intelligence"?

No. Believe it or not, "Artificial America".

I'm pretty sure he is aiming for "Automated Stupidity".

More like Automated Super Stupidity" or ASS.

Isn’t that a misnomer?

I propose a new term -- Synthetic Intelligence (SI)

In Polish, AI is called "Sztuczna Inteligencja" which translates to "Synthetic Intelligence".

In German it's Künstliche Intelligenz, which is another one of those curious English/German correspondences where even parts of words line up--Kunst is "art" and künstlich is "artificial".

In Slovak it's "Umelá inteligencia", same as "umelá hmota" - generic term for any kind of plastic.

Nope, "synthetic" would be "syntetyczna". "Sztuczna" just means "artificial", a direct translation.

syncretic intelligence is more accurate

Or combining the two words to get Superficial Intelligence.

Schutzstaffel Idiotisch; that is what he wants

Compelled speech is unconstitutional. Forcing someone to use SI instead of AI is like forcing someone to use pronouns. And this is not superintelligence: https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmar.... Calling it superintelligence is false.

AI is, whatever it is, there are cases where it is useful, there are cases where it's going to have very negative effects but re-branding doesn't change anything.

We can call an average person a genius. Even though we all agree on the new name we should still remember to assign only average person workloads to our newly minted genius.

Even if the name changes substance doesn't.

Please please please call it American Intelligence so we can all make fun of it and you when it breaks

I know asking meta questions about HN is not seen in the best light here, but I really am curious about how tied up in knots the reasoning must be of someone flagging this post about AI (HN's primary topic as of 2026).

It's constructed consensus. Pretty obvious when you go to r/conservative, 90% are the same 2-3 talking points, over and over again. It's not organic.

Also he's banning the term "human," the new official term is "stupid obsolete meat-bags."

They shall hereby be termed as "superior digital librarian with a spastic analyst streak"

Abhorrent Intelligence it is, then.

He's trying to sell the importance of LLMs and the need for data centers to his diminishing base - at the behest of his billionaire handlers and foreign investors. The (mis)use of words as a propaganda tool are at the core of this regime.

SS idiocy... the new starship.

To boldly go where not even idiots have gone before

What was wrong with ML? How many terms do we need to churn? What happened to AGI? Is that SGI now?

So now both halves of the name "OpenAI" are deprecated

LOL.. CloseSI.

Apparently Musk has officially renamed SpaceX, SpaceXsi and Nvidia has renamed its Ai data centers : superintelligence factories

I prefer the SI with cute swimsuit models.

Well, this is the SI you're actually going to get: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fascisms-history-...

Trump doesn't have any authority to ban the term "Artificial Intelligence". The First Amendment makes that clear. All he can do is mandate that government employees use his favored term.

That fact that we are talking about this rather than say the price of diesel shows you his genius. Do you really think he cares about this term or the name of Lake Ontario in any actual way other than as a tail to wag the dog?

No. He's a dementia addled, brain-dead old dotard. Every time he does or says something ridiculously stupid and it coincidentally has a side-effect that can be interpreted as favorable to him, doesn't make him a genius. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

Trump is dumber than box of brick bats.

The adulation he receives from his fans is an even worse look for them.

What's to say about the price of diesel? He promised it would be more expensive -- that everything would be more expensive -- and his weirdo supporters were on board. They got what they wanted. (Unfortunately so did the rest of us.)

So just to be clear, what you are saying is that it's fine to talk about banning terms like "AI" as more important than inflation or the cost of diesel as those issues are resolved as we got what we asked for?

Weird.

Yep, that's exactly what I'm saying, word for word, 100%.

We can and do talk about the price of diesel and new releases of Linux and quantum mechanics here on hn. But here we are talking about something else.

Is that not my point?

There's this very American trait of thinking these sorts of things matter by themselves, this almost-deification of their norms.

They only do as a social contract, as long as power structures agree to enforce them.

The regime has been undermining that social contract for years, and their enablers for decades. Who's gonna stop them?

Rules get broken all the time, including in the US, especially by this admin. Constitutional checks have failed many a time in history. Your country isn't special. If you're not careful and keep thinking rules that were agreed to generations ago automatically retain their power, you're in for a lot of pain down the line.

Oh 100%. I'm just stating a pedantic truth above. But the point that

"They only do as a social contract, as long as power structures agree to enforce them."

is absolutely true. I've said many time "The Constitution is 'only a piece of paper' at the end of the day." Ultimately it's down to us, "we the people" to enforce this stuff.

Unfortunately the culture in the USA these days is sick. And not just a little bit sick... We are truly staring into the abyss right now.

> We are truly staring into the abyss right now.

Inching our toes closer and closer to the edge as we contemplate probably falling in.

(Or standing out on thin air like Wile E. Coyote, not having yet succumbed to the inevitable pull of gravity simply because we haven't looked down yet and realized we're already in the act of plummeting.)

> All he can do is mandate that government employees use his favored term.

He can also say $0 will be given to anyone who uses the term AI. Let's say that applies to the NSF, then every AI researcher in the country has to use "SI" in their research if they want federal grants, which they all do. That'd be worse than a chilling effect, it'd be forced speech.

Will that hold up in court? Probably not. But in the meantime, researchers go without research dollars, labs are shut down, projects are mothballed, students are fired, and a court ruling doesn't bring any of that back or undo any damage.

AI is a very bad and inaccurate term!

> AI is a very bad and inaccurate term!

... and "Superintelligence" even more so.

“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globality scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called super intelligence. Changing the name,” Trump said.

“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he continued. “It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”

Let's reserve AI for Donald Trump himself, the American Idiot.

The term AI always bothered me in reference to generative AI, because I always felt generative AI isn't artificial intelligence. Next Word Prediction Model sits better with me.

Humans chuck out a bunch of next words too. Intelligence is more if they are any good.

I'm puzzled about why people were so vehement at roasting Joe Biden for his clear advanced age, while Trump is blatantly suffering from dementia or some similar mental impairment. His speech is way more rambling and incoherent that anything Joe Biden ever went through, and it doesn't get better when he's in a more familiar setting - quite the opposite, he gets more and more nonsensical whenever is giving an interview to anybody

Joe Biden also wasn't a cruel person, and that's the main reason you have what you have today.

> His speech is way more rambling and incoherent that anything Joe Biden ever went through

Yes, even bringing into scope the debate which did Biden in, he was more coherent than Trump.

Trump sounds the same today as he did 10 years ago, delusions can see past obvious warts.

The people complaining about Biden never gave two shits about the president's mental capacity.

I mean this is partly deranged megalomania but it's also partly a shibboleth right? You can signal that you're a true believer loyalist by not using the verboten term

Yes, and it can have a beneficial effect for populations in (modeled) social environments, eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22926-1

but as the title of the paper implies it works much better when it's a covert means of in-group identification, allowing prisoners-dilemma style cooperation without tipping off counterparties about affiliation. When it's no longer a covert signal but more of a compliance test I suspect it rapidly tips into negative utility.

Lol, are there any adults left in White House? :)

Can't wait to cross Trump Ocean, land in Gulf of America, walk through New America (New Mexico) and shake Trump's hand for this incredible allocation of resources

SI-lum

SIop

The party of free speech, ladies and gentlemen.

LOL wut? What has this country come to

TL;DR:

Trump hit on The Wall Street Journal for using the term AI, rather super intelligence (SI), his preferred term.

“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 wrote.

He signed an executive order in September directing the executive branch to use SI, instead of AI.

Is 11 paragraphs of clearly written text really so hard to read that people need a 3 paragraph summary that leaves out one of the best parts?

> Trump said in a post earlier this month that the White House “considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”

He is calling people who use AI as a term still the enemy. Delightfully idiotic, and his supporters will probably eat it up.

Despite the fact that banning AI as a term is pretty silly, he's right in that virtually everyone else is using SI.

> he's right in that virtually everyone else is using SI.

You actually think people outside the LLM hype machine are using "Super Intelligence" instead of "Artificial Intelligence"? SI is not a common term (yet).

More choice quotes:

good luck with that one buddy

like all the other insanity, just for the next 800 days

but seriously, we have to do something to enlighten people who constantly give power to this kind of garbage or it's just going to keep happening

if just half the stuff about what Jared has been doing it's going to take decades to undo this

and Russell Vought singlehandedly has set back science in this country 50 years

Old man yells at cloud

> US President says he will ban the term 'cannibalism[0]'

fixed that for you

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCPAIg7RUq8

Good luck.

I was about to think that this is the first not outrageously idiotic thing I hear from Trump, but calling it "super intelligence" instead is of course even more wrong. How could I be so naive and optimistic.

> He signed an executive order in September directing the executive branch to use SI, instead of AI.

He's definitely bullshitmaxxing, which perfectly matches expectations.

He likes to rename things, who cares, it will changed the moment hes out of office. But rename schools and streets because it was named after a historical figure belonging to a countries history that needs to be erased, now we're talking.

Trump's shenanigans may be funny/deranged depending on your POV, but his message seems to be that calling it Artificial implies limitations not representative of its capabilities - and he is absolutely correct.

ofc his corollary points about implications for American power are debatable; but we are now living for the first time in our history with an alien intelligence that in some cases exceeds our own, and its reasonable to consider how we deal with that on a cultural and political level.

> calling it Artificial implies limitations not representative of its capabilities

Artificial doesn't, necessarily, mean limited, though. It means that it's man-made, which is an accurate description of these objects and systems.

No, the message is that he can control your language.

AI is only as powerful as the data its trained on. It has not, and will never exceed general human intelligence.

Artificial as in synthetic or man-made, everyone knows what it means, you're just giving a post-hoc rationalization for whatever game he's playing.

No. There's nothing post-hoc about my position.

Some of us have been thinking deeply about this subject for many years.

Long before the LLM era I (and I'm sure many others) considered AI a misnomer in the context of human-level intelligence, tho I did (apparently wrongly) consider sentience a prerequisite.

Trump may be coming at this from different motivations, but it's entirely consistent.

Artificial Dams are renowned for their limited damming capabilities with respect to the natural beaver-built genuine article.

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