Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.
In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he is renaming artificial intelligence, or AI, directing all U.S. agencies to call it “super intelligence” and encouraging the world community to follow suit.
The proposed name change comes as public concerns are mounting regarding the technology’s unregulated expansion, prompting tech experts and some industry heads to call for a slowdown of AI’s growth.
“The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called ‘super intelligence,'” Trump said. “Changing the name.”
He continued:
The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake. … From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.
“Welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI. Let’s see if that goes,” Trump added.
“It sounds much better.”
Days before his UN speech, Trump surveyed his Truth Social followers on the idea of changing AI’s name. Trump provided users with three choices in his initial post: “super intelligence,” “extreme intelligence,” or “superior intelligence.” In a later post, he removed the “extreme” option, and “super intelligence” defeated “superior” by a 2 to 1 margin in the unscientific poll.
Trump has attempted to rename a number of things during his second presidential term, despite widespread opposition from Americans. His renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid a trade dispute with Canada is opposed by 63 percent of voters, according to a recent Reuters poll. And nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe Trump has “gone too far” in his attempt to add his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a CNN poll found.
Trump has ardently defended AI’s expansion, even as industry experts warn about the potential harms of the technology. Calling himself a “hoax buster” in a Truth Social post last week, Trump suggested those with concerns were “treasonous.” In a separate post, he denounced calls for regulations on AI, calling himself the only “guardrail” needed.
It was revealed last week by sources familiar with the situation that a report submitted by a military analyst, relying on unfounded information from AI, nearly led to an attack on a Chinese ship near the Middle East. Such an attack could have potentially started a war with China, one source said.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.