Trump proposes rebranding AI as "super intelligence," commentator criticizes the field's terminology
At the UN General Assembly, Trump called for rebranding AI as "super intelligence." Tech Policy Press commentator Amber Sinha responds by criticizing AI terminology as marketing rather than science, pointing to the history of the term artificial intelligence since 1955.
US President Trump, at the UN General Assembly in New York ("last week," according to the article), called for rebranding the term artificial intelligence as "super intelligence." In a speech to world leaders he said that "whoever wins super intelligence, wins" — shifting the rhetoric of the AI race toward the new term.
Author Amber Sinha, a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press, argues in a commentary that the terminology around AI did not arise from scientific systematics but from marketing and institutional reasons. He notes that the term "artificial intelligence" was chosen by John McCarthy in 1955 for a workshop at Dartmouth College primarily to distinguish it from the then-dominant cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. According to the author, this choice set an anthropomorphic framing that still complicates AI policy and regulation today. He also cites Marvin Minsky, who called "intelligence" a "suitcase word" — a term containing a range of unrelated processes such as reasoning, perception, learning, or planning.
The text further connects this critique to Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance" and its application to privacy regulation (Daniel Solove), suggesting a similar approach to AI. It also mentions the misleading metaphor of "hallucination" for language model errors; according to Melanie Mitchell, this is a category error, because the model has no notion of truth or reality at all.
The available portion of the article is incomplete and does not end with a closed conclusion. See the source article for details.
Why it matters
The text is an opinion piece about how language and metaphors (artificial intelligence, hallucination, super intelligence) shape public debate and AI regulation; it does not concern a specific product or corporate decision. The available portion of the article contains no conclusion or concrete policy recommendations, so it implies no direct practical impact for individuals or companies.
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