US President says he will ban the term 'artificial intelligence'
Comments
mullingitover
A_D_E_P_T
Those .si domains his cronies are squatting on aren't selling, I guess.
MandieD
That's Slovenia's TLD... hey, wait a minute.
ted_bunny
In case you're kidding, there is proof of his network buying up these domains before this was announced.
dofm
This is because someone's told him he probably can't rename New Mexico?
jon128
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.
martythemaniak
There's no reason to think it didn't.
jon128
I've been sold so hard on the general outlandishness at this I'd be disappointed if it didn't tbh
smallmancontrov
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.
staticman2
I can't imagine why someone with control of a nuclear arsenal wasn't wetting his pants over the existential risk of graphic cards.
smallmancontrov
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.
red_candle_wax
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.
derjames
Or New England
verdverm
or the oceans, but maybe most of all the Kennedy center, he is a very bitter and spiteful person
rbanffy
I’ll continue using the term, the same way I will continue deadnaming Twitter.
ModernMech
I still call Zuckerberg's company The Facebook.
mindslight
IMO "Xitter" is so much truer to its spirit. "okay poop is coming out"
rbanffy
I will reserve myself the right to deadname the company of a guy who deadnames his own daughter
tartuffe78
Finally, something voters care about.
Bill2Lewis
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.
everdrive
More meaningless symbolic gestures rather than any sort of actual policy.
ModernMech
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.
Jamesbeam
> 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?
nilamo
We here in North Devosica, formerly Michigan, fully support Trumpsday and the month of America (formerly July).
RajT88
Renamed "America Intelligence"?
michael_michael
No. Believe it or not, "Artificial America".
folbec
I'm pretty sure he is aiming for "Automated Stupidity".
ghusto
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.
buckwheatmilk
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.
xeonmc
I propose a new term -- Synthetic Intelligence (SI)
drybjed
In Polish, AI is called "Sztuczna Inteligencja" which translates to "Synthetic Intelligence".
titzer
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".
dvh
In Slovak it's "Umelá inteligencia", same as "umelá hmota" - generic term for any kind of plastic.
pavon
Or combining the two words to get Superficial Intelligence.
silverFork
Schutzstaffel Idiotisch; that is what he wants
gingerrr
syncretic intelligence is more accurate
GuginoCrectoMan
You have no idea what you're talking about mate.
throw20261022
[dead]
k310
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...
irthomasthomas
“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.”
kokanee
So now both halves of the name "OpenAI" are deprecated
silverFork
LOL.. CloseSI.
Apparently Musk has officially renamed SpaceX, SpaceXsi and Nvidia has renamed its Ai data centers : superintelligence factories
egberts1
They shall hereby be termed as "superior digital librarian with a spastic analyst streak"
O1111OOO
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.
spaceman_2020
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
zombocomvibes
AI is a very bad and inaccurate term!
sharkjacobs
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
anigbrowl
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.
PowerElectronix
Abhorrent Intelligence it is, then.
qalmakka
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
jacquesm
Joe Biden also wasn't a cruel person, and that's the main reason you have what you have today.
ModernMech
> 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.
nilamo
Trump sounds the same today as he did 10 years ago, delusions can see past obvious warts.
the_gastropod
The party of free speech, ladies and gentlemen.
morkalork
Old man yells at cloud
matt3210
LOL wut? What has this country come to
ASalazarMX
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.
irthomasthomas
More choice quotes:
“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.”
Freedom2
Despite the fact that banning AI as a term is pretty silly, he's right in that virtually everyone else is using SI.
Jtsummers
> 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).
Jtsummers
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.
mindcrime
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.
ModernMech
> 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.
vrganj
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.
mindcrime
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.
uberman
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?
dpkirchner
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.)
mypalmike
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.
mindcrime
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.
zombocomvibes
The adulation he receives from his fans is an even worse look for them.
treetalker
SI-lum
ThomW
SIop
ck2
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
kmeisthax
> US President says he will ban the term 'cannibalism[0]'
fixed that for you
W-Stool
Good luck.
mellosouls
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.
dumberquestions
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.
kian
Artificial Dams are renowned for their limited damming capabilities with respect to the natural beaver-built genuine article.
Jtsummers
> 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.
jacquesm
No, the message is that he can control your language.
Dezvous
AI is only as powerful as the data its trained on. It has not, and will never exceed general human intelligence.
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