Trump’s Attempt to Rename AI Misunderstands the MAGA Faithful

Donald Trump has decided that artificial intelligence has a marketing problem. After all, nobody likes anything “artificial.” So this weekend, the branding expert who brought you such perfectly named products like Trump Steaks, Trump Taj Mahal, and Trump Tower set out to solve the problem.

“Many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence,” he wrote on Twitter before introducing his proposed alternatives that would better capture all the excitement and endless possibility that AI presents. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI),” he said, while creating a poll to give people the opportunity to pick the “the best name for this ever growing ‘Revolution.'”

Many people think that the words “Artificial Intelligence” are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or,…

Unfortunately for Trump, a man with his finger on the pulse despite barely having one himself, all of the options do a much better job of stirring up the feelings of fear that most people have around AI. “Superior” and “supreme” intelligence seem to suggest that this technology is smarter than us, better than us, and frankly might as well have power over us—not exactly the kind of thing that his populist base gets excited about.

“Superior intelligence” landed a plurality in the poll, with 41.5% of voters selecting it . But it’s kind of the worst option on the board if you’re trying to quell people’s concerns about AI and its potential to do everything from displace millions of workers to exceed human intelligence and deem us a blight on the planet that needs to be eliminated. Calling artificial intelligence “superior” kinda necessitates calling human intelligence “inferior,” and that’s just not gonna land. (Or maybe it does? People did vote for it, after all.)

Trump apparently recognized the dissonance—or just decided he had a better idea—and on Monday ran a second poll on Truth Social where he gave people the option to choose between “Superior Intelligence” and “Super Intelligence.” The latter is winning pretty handily, and Trump very quickly adopted it, using “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in a post where he compared AI doomerism to climate change—an issue that has not been a disaster, nor was it ever a big deal in his mind.

Superintelligence is, of course, already a thing. Philosopher Nick Bostrom first wrote about artificial superintelligence , which he defined as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills,” back in 1997. So just about 30 years late to that one.