US President Donald Trump wants to banish the word “artificial” from artificial intelligence, saying it makes one of the world’s most consequential technologies sound “fake”.

Across the Pacific, however, China’s name for the technology has long carried a different connotation – one that places humans, rather than artificiality, at its centre.

Trump last week signed an executive order directing US federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence”, or AI, with “Super Intelligence”, or SI, in official communications, websites and policy documents.

The White House said the new terminology better reflected the rapidly advancing capabilities and “limitless opportunities” of the technology.

While the term “artificial intelligence” dates back to 1956 – coined by American computer scientist John McCarthy at a landmark workshop at Dartmouth College – the history of its Chinese counterpart offers a different perspective on the relationship between humans and intelligent machines.

China adopted its term for the technology, from the Japanese , which uses the same characters, according to Shuang Frost, an assistant professor at Aarhus University who researches Chinese AI translation.

The first two characters, , combine (human) with (work or labour), while refers to intelligence. Frost said can therefore be translated literally as “human-made intelligence”.

“‘Artificial’ can suggest something synthetic or opposed to the natural and human; explicitly reminds us that this intelligence is the product of human work,” Frost told the South China Morning Post.

That distinction took on particular significance as AI emerged as an academic field in China around 1980. Viewing the technology through a Marxist lens, early Chinese theorists saw AI not as a competing “alien intelligence”, but as a tool built to extend and transform human potential, Frost said.

While not every Chinese speaker consciously thinks of that history when using the term, “the human is linguistically much harder to remove from than it is from ‘artificial intelligence’”, she added.

In China, there is a running joke that some AI-powered products contain more than – more human labour than intelligence. This refers to the workers who have historically labelled data and performed behind-the-scenes tasks needed to make automated systems work, Frost wrote in a book chapter tracing the history and translation of Chinese AI terminology in .

While Trump’s move to adopt “super intelligence” seeks to elevate the technology by emphasising capabilities beyond human intelligence, Frost said greater capability did not automatically make the Chinese term obsolete. An intelligence could become extraordinarily powerful and still be “human-made”, she noted. China also had its own debate over what to call the technology.

In March, an online commentary published by People’s Daily argued that the ubiquitous English abbreviation “AI” was an unsatisfying way to describe a technology becoming deeply embedded in everyday Chinese life.

It proposed finding a shorter, catchier Chinese alternative to complement the formal term , pointing to home-grown names such as (“electric brain”) for computer, and (“hand machine”) for mobile phone.

Chao Hao, an associate professor in the department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore, said the Chinese debate centred on “accessibility, linguistic identity and public communication”.

A shorter Chinese label could prove useful while preserving the established term , said Chao, whose research lies at the intersection of translation studies and natural language processing.

Frost noted that the US and China naming debates differ fundamentally in intent. While Trump argues AI has outgrown its English name, the Chinese debate centres on why an English abbreviation is replacing an established native term.

Still, the different terms should also not be read as evidence of neatly divided American and Chinese world views, Frost cautioned. Chinese technological vocabulary has always been “profoundly transnational”, arriving via Japan while drawing heavily on Western scholarship, she said.

“Concepts change as they travel,” Frost said. “They are not simply imported intact from one culture into another.”Still, could eventually face a conceptual challenge of its own.

As AI systems take on a greater role in training and upgrading subsequent models – a process known as recursive self-improvement (RSI) – humans could become increasingly distanced from the direct production of machine intelligence, Frost said.

That raises a fundamental question: how “human-made” must a system remain to justify being called ?

“Ironically, its future difficulty may arise not because AI becomes too intelligent to be called , but because it becomes less visibly – less visibly the product of human making,” Frost said. In that scenario, language may adapt once again.

“Perhaps could supplement it for a specific capability category and in specific contexts,” Chao said, referring to – the Chinese term for “super”.