Post from Truth Social

A naming contest where every option is a rank

The post proposes replacing "Artificial Intelligence" with "Superior Intelligence (SI)," "Extreme Intelligence (EI)," or "Supreme Intelligence (SI)." The current name describes where the technology comes from: "artificial" means made by people. All three replacements instead describe how high it sits. "Superior" is a comparative, "Supreme" is the top of the scale, and "Extreme" is magnitude. His case against the current term is aesthetic ("inaccurate, and very ineloquent"), and so is his case for the new ones ("far more elegant and accurate"). In this post, elegance means sounding bigger. That points to a status motive. The post's question is what to call the technology so that it sounds as large as possible, and it never asks what the technology does.

The dislike of "artificial" has a record. At the July 2025 White House AI summit he told the audience he didn't like the name, didn't like "anything that's artificial," and wanted it changed. This post comes back to that preference more than a year later. "Artificial" seems to register with him as fake or lesser, and a word with that connotation can't be attached to something he wants to champion. There is some openness to ideas here, but it runs in one direction: toward inflating the term.

The post fits a week of monumental naming and permanence claims. On September 17 he asked for an 11-foot Washington statue and, eventually, a 30-foot "Washington Colossus." On September 18 he announced a Greenland deal granting control "FOREVER," followed by a list headed "TOP 25 TRUMP ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF TERM THREE." Renaming things has been a steady act of his sovereignty (Gulf of America, Department of War), and here it takes a ceremonial, benevolent-King form. Xi Jinping's state visit on September 24, with AI on the agenda, is a plausible prompt for the timing. Nothing in the text links the two, so that link is low confidence.

"Many people think," then a request for votes

The opening, "Many people think," credits the crowd with a view he has stated himself. It is a bandwagon move: his own preference is presented as consensus before anyone has voted. The closing, "This is a Poll, and I would appreciate everybody voting!", is an open invitation to take part, written in a warm, courteous register ("I would appreciate"). No opponent is named, and nothing sets off the post except the topic. It reads as routine audience engagement with a mild bid for supply, not as a response to an injury. The one defense with text behind it is idealization of the technology. Calling it "Supreme Intelligence" and an "ever growing 'Revolution'" raises the thing he is backing to the top of a hierarchy. It is idealization in its mildest form, with no devalued counterpart.

Where the text slips

The first sentence is circular. It says the words "Artificial Intelligence" are inaccurate "relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence," so the term is measured against itself. He most likely meant the technology ("relative to what it actually is"), and what came out repeated the label. That looks like a word-finding lapse or an unrevised draft. "This new phenomena" uses the plural for the singular, a long-standing error in his speech and writing that fits his baseline. The poll also gives two of its three options the same abbreviation, "SI," so a vote by acronym would be ambiguous. That is a logic slip a proofreader would catch. Only the circular sentence bears on coherence, and alone it is one slip in an otherwise orderly five-sentence post.

Who wrote it

The timestamp, 15:29 UTC, is 11:29 a.m. Eastern on a Saturday, assuming he was on the East Coast after the Greenland announcement. That is inside business hours, which favors staff. The text points the other way. It repeats his own documented dislike of the word, contains the "phenomena" error, and gives two options the same "SI." The commas are erratic ("(SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or,"), and the question mark sits inside the scare quotes in "Revolution?" A staff draft would probably have caught the circular opening. On balance the post reads as his: dictated or typed by him, possibly posted by staff. The text doesn't show whether a real poll widget was attached.

The premise the post rests on

Critics of the term "AI" do exist, but they object in the opposite direction. Emily Bender has called "AI" a marketing term that overstates the systems. Ted Chiang proposed "applied statistics" as a more accurate label. For these critics the word "intelligence" is too generous. The post borrows the fact that people are dissatisfied with the name and reverses what they are dissatisfied about, proposing names that inflate the term further. The only verifiable claim holds up as to disagreement over the name and fails as to its direction.

Fact Verification

Overall Veracity: 50%