Donald Trump has a new nickname campaign, and this time the target is an entire technology category.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has pushed "super intelligence" as a replacement for "artificial intelligence," while turning "artificial" into a put-down and branding resisters "THE ENEMY." It is the same playbook that produced "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary" during his first campaign, and that turned "fake news" from a description of scammy outlets into a blanket insult for the press. Some of the biggest names in AI are reportedly going along with the relabeling.
That matters because language sets the terms of a debate before anyone argues the substance. If "super intelligence" sticks, skepticism about safety, bias, or job losses starts sounding like opposition to progress itself, a framing problem rather than a technology one. Industry players who adopt the new term get to look aligned with the White House without changing anything about what they are actually building.
Renaming a technology has never made it safer or more reliable - it just changes who gets cast as the villain in the sentence.