President Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 29 directing federal agencies to use the term “super intelligence” instead of AI, though the AI industry already uses “superintelligence” to mean a hypothetical technology that exceeds human cognition in nearly all fields, which has not yet been achieved.

Experts say the definition matters for regulation and that the new term could be misleading, while industry leaders have so far made little change in how they refer to their technology.

“It’s really important that we get our definition right with any attempts at regulating this very fast-moving technology,” said Baobao Zhang, Maxwell Dean Associate Professor of the Politics of AI. “The other concern is that you might have AI systems that currently do not fall under these definitions, that still could cause a lot of harm to humans, including catastrophic harm.”

Super intelligence would be a misleading descriptor for general-purpose AI, as well as AI systems that are more narrow in scope, such as self-driving cars or AI that diagnoses medical problems, Zhang says.

Read more in the Poynter Institute article, “ Trump renamed AI to ‘super intelligence.’ That label means something already..”