U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Sept. 19 post that many people consider the term "Artificial Intelligence" inaccurate and inelegant, and he put forward three replacement names for public voting, calling them more suitable for the ongoing "revolution."
Two of the three alternatives use the same acronym
The three options Trump listed were Superior Intelligence (SI), Extreme Intelligence (EI), and Supreme Intelligence (SI). All three drop the word "artificial" and replace it with adjectives suggesting superiority, extremity, or supremacy.
The first and third choices, however, both shorten to SI. The post did not address that overlap and did not explain how the two would be distinguished if both remained under consideration.
Poll runs on Truth Social, while the X post has no voting function
The poll was set up on Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, which has built-in polling tools. The same text was also posted on X, but the X version did not include a poll, so users there could only express views in the reply thread.
Voting was still ongoing. ABMedia said media outlets citing vote totals at different times showed wide gaps, and there was no stable result available to quote.
The term dates back to a 1955 proposal
ABMedia said the wording Trump questioned has been in use for 70 years. According to an original document preserved by Stanford University, the phrase "artificial intelligence" appeared in a proposal dated Aug. 31, 1955. The document was signed by four people: J. McCarthy of Dartmouth College, M. L. Minsky of Harvard University, N. Rochester of IBM, and C. E. Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The proposal opened by suggesting a two-month research project on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1956, with 10 participants.
The proposal also gave a clear definition
The document described the problem of artificial intelligence as making a machine behave in ways that, if done by humans, would be called intelligent. That formulation addressed outward behavior and did not claim whether machine intelligence was real or not.
Trump said in his post that the term is inaccurate, but he did not explain what exactly was inaccurate about it. ABMedia added that the 1956 workshop was later regarded as the starting point of artificial intelligence as a research field, and the name has remained in use since then.