On Thursday the President of the United States posted a message on Truth Social.
I want you to read it just the way he wrote it.
“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!”
That is the whole thing. He gave no more reason than that. He signed it President Donald J. Trump. He owns those words, so I am putting his name on them.
Now, I have used the term “artificial intelligence” every day for over a year. I have written about it in hundreds of posts. So by his count, I am the enemy. I guess a lot of you are too.
This did not come out of nowhere. On September 21 he ran a poll on his own site. He asked his followers whether they liked “super intelligence” or “superior intelligence.” Super won. The next day he stood up at the United Nations and announced that AI would now be called super intelligence. He said the word “artificial” makes it sound fake. He also said he did not know if he had the power to change it. “We’re gonna find out pretty soon,” he said.
Since then the State Department has told its diplomats to use the new name. The big tech companies signed a pledge that puts the term in writing across the government. On October 4 he set up a new federal group called the Super Intelligence Force. Then on Thursday he named the rest of us the enemy.
So that is where we stand. Now let me tell you why I care about one little word.
The name “artificial intelligence” goes back to 1956. A man named John McCarthy came up with it for a summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College. It has been in the textbooks for seventy years. It is in the laws. It is in the classrooms. It is in the way regular people talk at the kitchen table.
The word “artificial” was an honest word. It told you what the thing was. It was made, not born. It was built by people, out of people’s words. It did not pretend to be something it was not.
The word “super” is a different kind of word. It is not a description. It is a claim. It tells you the thing is better than you before it has shown you a single thing. It asks for your trust up front, on credit.
And that is where I have to plant my feet.
I have spent a long time building a set of rules for how AI should behave. I call it The Faust Baseline. One of the first rules in it is simple. No claim without evidence. And how sure you sound has to match how much proof you actually have. Sounding more sure than the proof allows is a violation. It does not matter who is talking.
There is another rule in there I keep coming back to. Every statement has to carry the weight it claims to carry. A word like “super” claims a lot of weight. Nobody has put it on the scale.
Under those rules, the name does not matter. Call it artificial. Call it super. Call it Fred. The machine still has to show you where it got its answer. It still has to tell you what it does not know. It still has to leave the final call with you. A new label does not change the standard one inch.
That is the whole point of a standard. It holds no matter who is in charge or what they decide to call things.
Now let me tell you a story about who really decides what a thing is called.
In April of 1985, the Coca-Cola Company changed its formula. They called it New Coke. They had all the money in the world behind it. They had the ads, the stores and the shelf space. They had every bit of muscle a company can have.
And the people said no.
They called. They wrote letters. They stopped buying. In seventy-nine days the company gave up. They brought back the old recipe and called it Coca-Cola Classic. The biggest soft drink company on earth bent to the people who drank it.
Here is another one. In 2003, some folks in Congress decided French fries should be called “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria. They put it on the menu and made a show of it. A few years later it quietly went back. Out in the rest of the country, people never stopped saying French fries.
You see the pattern. The powerful can print whatever they like on a menu or a memo. The people decide what sticks. And when a thing reminds folks of a stunt, they set it aside. Then they remember who pushed it.
But I have to be honest with you about one thing. The people only decide when they are paying attention.
New Coke got caught because everybody tasted it. It was loud. You could not miss it. A word change is quieter than that. It slips into a contract. It shows up on a government form. It gets printed on a software box. It settles in one page at a time, while nobody is looking.
The big tech companies signed that pledge. Watch what they put on their own products. If they start selling you “super intelligence,” then the word is coming to your house whether you asked for it or not. And it will come carrying a promise that nobody has checked.
So here is what I am asking you to do.
Keep using the honest word if you want to. Nobody can take that from you. But more than that, keep doing the honest work. When a machine gives you an answer, ask it where it got that answer. Make it show you. If it cannot show you, do not trust it, whatever name is printed on the box.
That is your end of the table. Nobody holds it for you. Not a president, not a company, and not a machine. You decide what you accept. You hold the sellers to account when they sell you a name instead of the goods.
The Baseline was built to keep the playing field level. The machine holds to a standard. You hold to your judgment. Both of you answer for what comes out. A new name from the top does not tilt that field one bit, unless you let it.
So go ahead and call me the enemy. I will keep calling it what it is. And I will keep asking it to prove what it says.
A name is a claim. A claim has to show its work. That goes for machines. It goes for presidents too.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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