At his UN General Assembly address this week, President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. government will now refer to artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence," because, in his framing, the word "artificial" makes the tech sound fake.

But while "Super Intelligence" may not sound fake, it is a term that carries its own baggage, and potentially a misleading one. 

"Super" is among the most thoroughly saturated prefixes in the English language, loaded with decades of pop-culture pizzazz and associations with everything from superheroes and superpowers to Super Mario and Super Bowl Sunday. Far from making the technology sound more glitzy, the new "super" terminology arguably makes it sound like something from a lyric sheet or a comic book.

Think about every place "super" shows up in culture. Rick James wasn’t describing a software engineer in “Super Freak”; he was describing a cartoon of desire. Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly is a morality tale about the cost of fantasy, not how fast AI can disprove a math problem.

Oasis titled a song "Champagne Supernova" precisely because a supernova is a star’s spectacular, final, self-annihilating collapse; gorgeous, and also the end of everything. But "Supernova" by aespa is anything but final, using a dying star’s explosion as a metaphor for personal awakening, power, and self-confidence.

Now, does anyone else find it perplexing to stick "super" in front of intelligence and make all of the previous issues that were associated with the now super-saturated "Artificial Intelligence" go away?

In fact, if we are going to look for a version of "super" that actually fits the reality of today’s AI, we shouldn’t look at Super Bowls, Superman, superstars, or supernovas.

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