They Fell In Line, Not Me, AI

A few days ago I wrote about a word.

The President of the United States decided “artificial intelligence” should now be called “super intelligence.” He signed an order telling the federal government to use the new name. Then he said anyone still using the old one was the enemy.

I said then that a name handed down by decree doesn’t hold. The words people use at the kitchen table outlast any order. I still believe that.

But something happened this week that I want to talk about. Because it’s not about the word anymore. It’s about who picked it up.

The builders fell in line.

Jensen Huang runs Nvidia. His company makes the chips that nearly every AI system in the world runs on. After a meeting with the President, he started calling his data centers “super intelligence factories.”

Sam Altman runs OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He told a reporter his company now uses both terms. And he said “super intelligence” was the better word.

Elon Musk said he would rename his company from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. He didn’t say when.

On top of that, the big tech companies signed something called a “super intelligence accord.” It was described as “morally binding.” I went looking for what’s actually in it. I couldn’t find the full terms. I couldn’t find a complete list of who signed. A promise you can’t read isn’t much of a promise.

Changing a word is a small thing. Nobody got hurt. No law changed what these machines can do. If a company wants to call its product something new, that’s its business.

But watch how fast it happened. One order. One meeting. And within days, the men who build the most powerful technology on earth were using the new word like they’d thought of it themselves.

That tells you something. Not about the word. About the builders.

We talked here recently about the fox and the henhouse. The companies building AI write their own rules. They test their own work. They tell you their machines are safe, and you’re supposed to take their word for it. I said the builder should never sign off on his own homework.

Here’s what this week shows. The fox doesn’t just guard the henhouse. The fox takes orders from whoever holds the most power that day. And he’ll change his own vocabulary to keep the door open.

Ask yourself this. If these companies will rename their product to please the man in charge, what else will they change? Their safety testing? Their warnings? What they tell you about what the machine can and can’t do?

I’m not saying they will. I’m saying we have no way to check. And that’s the problem.

Let me tell you why the word itself matters too.

“Artificial” was an honest word. It told you what the thing was. Made, not born. Built by people. It didn’t pretend.

“Super” is a different kind of word. It doesn’t describe. It claims. It tells you the thing is better than you before it has shown you anything. It asks for your trust up front.

And in the world of AI, “super intelligence” isn’t just a catchy phrase. It has a meaning. For years, scientists have used it for a machine that beats human beings at nearly everything. That’s the line the safety people watch for. Some laws and some testing rules are built around it.

The machines we have today don’t meet that bar. Not even close. They make mistakes. They make things up. They need a person checking their work.

So when the builders start calling today’s tools “super intelligence,” two things happen. First, the products sound bigger than they are. That’s good for sales. Second, the line the watchdogs need gets blurry. If everything is super intelligence, then nothing is. And the day something actually crosses that line, nobody will have a clean word left to sound the alarm with.

That’s not politics. That’s housekeeping. You don’t let anybody move the survey stakes, no matter who they are or what party they belong to.

Now here’s the part I want you to hold on to.

The builders fell in line. The government handed down a name. But neither one of them gets the final say. You do.

Power is lent, not owned. I said that before and I’ll keep saying it. The companies hold what we allow them to hold. The government holds what we allow it to hold. And words belong to the people who speak them.

You can keep calling it artificial intelligence. Nobody can stop you. And every time you do, you’re keeping an honest word alive. You’re keeping the line where it belongs.

More than that, you can hold these companies to what they say. When they call it super, ask them to prove it. Ask what it can’t do. Ask who checked it besides themselves. Ask to read that accord they signed.

A machine doesn’t earn trust by getting a bigger name. It earns trust the same way a man does. By showing its work. By telling you what it doesn’t know. By leaving the final call with you.

That’s the standard. It doesn’t bend to who’s in charge. It doesn’t change when the label changes. Call it artificial. Call it super. Call it whatever you like. The rules for how it behaves are the same.

The builders fell in line this week. That’s on them.

Where we stand is on us.

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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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