The President Ran a Truth Social "Poll" to Rename "Artificial Intelligence" — Which He Called "Inaccurate, and Very Ineloquent" — Proposing the Grander-Sounding "Superior," "Supreme," or "Extreme" Intelligence, in a Post So Muddled It Argued AI Was Inaccurate "Relative to AI" and Offered Two Options Abbreviated the Same Way; the Same Day, He Announced He's Forming an "AI Force"

It is a small thing to post a poll asking what to rename a technology. It is a larger thing when the person posting it is the President of the United States, the technology is the most consequential of the decade, and the post reveals that he does not quite understand the word he wants to replace. Trump managed all three at once.

The post

On September 19, 2026, Trump wrote on Truth Social that "many people" find the words "Artificial Intelligence" "inaccurate, and very ineloquent," and proposed that "a far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI)." He framed it as a poll — "I would appreciate everybody voting!" — asking which is the best name for "this ever growing 'Revolution.'" More than 27,000 people weighed in. In a second post the same day, he announced he is forming an "AI Force" and will soon name an AI czar.

A monument to muddle

The post refutes itself twice over, without any help from critics. First, its central claim is circular: it says "Artificial Intelligence" is an inaccurate description "relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence" — comparing the term to itself, which is not an argument but a loop. Second, of the three grand alternatives he offers, two share the same acronym: "Superior Intelligence (SI)" and "Supreme Intelligence (SI)." A poll asking people to choose between options that abbreviate identically is a poll that has not been thought through for the length of a single sentence. This is not a policy proposal; it is a stray thought published to a few million followers and dignified as a "poll."

The tell: "artificial" is the accurate word

The revealing part is the stated goal. Trump said he wanted a more accurate name — and then proposed three that are less accurate. "Artificial" is not a slur on the technology; it is a precise description of what it is: intelligence produced by machines rather than occurring in nature. That is the whole point of the word, and it is why scientists have used it for seventy years. His replacements — Superior, Supreme, Extreme — describe not what the thing is but how impressive he wants it to sound. They are superlatives, the vocabulary of branding, not description. Swapping an accurate adjective for a grandiose one and calling the result "more accurate" gets the concept exactly backwards. There is a real, longstanding debate about whether "AI" oversells machine systems as truly "intelligent" — but the honest critiques run toward humbler terms, not toward "Supreme."

Why the timing matters

This would be a harmless curiosity if it were not paired with governance. The same day he could not explain why AI is called "artificial," Trump announced he is building an "AI Force" and appointing a czar to steer national policy on the technology — and this comes amid a genuinely serious moment, with members of his own party split over his defense of the AI industry and figures like OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk publicly urging that development be slowed for safety. Into that debate — about capability, risk, jobs, and control of the most powerful tools humans have built — the president's contribution was a branding poll offering two options with the same initials. It is the substitution of vocabulary for policy: rename the thing, declare a "Force," name a czar, and treat the appearance of command as the substance of it.

Why it belongs here

On its own the poll is trivial, and that is partly the point of including it: it shows where the presidential attention goes. It also fits a documented reflex this archive has tracked — the urge to rename what he cannot control. He decreed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," ordered Lake Ontario renamed "Lake America," and spent a Labor Day pushing to rebrand New Mexico as "New America." Each was symbolic conquest with no power behind it; a president cannot actually rename a shared body of water, a state, or — least of all — a global scientific field used in every language on earth. "Artificial Intelligence" will remain artificial intelligence no matter how the Truth Social poll closes. What the poll changes is only the record of how a president chose to spend a Friday while standing up a force to govern a technology he could not, that same day, correctly describe.