Donald Trump wants artificial intelligence (AI) renamed "super intelligence" (SI). Experts say it won't wash with a wary public, even as the US president threatens to treat holdouts as enemies.

On Thursday, he warned anyone refusing to adopt the term would be considered an "ENEMY" by the White House. He didn't say what that meant.

He floated the name change in September before the UN General Assembly. "The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually amazing," he said. He later signed an executive order mandating the term in government communications.

Jean-Pierre Dube, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago, says the White House fears that the backlash against AI and data centers could "stifle one of the key drivers of economic growth right now" and "cede technological dominance to China."

But "the idea that a rebrand that mischaracterizes the technology will turn around some of the public sentiment seems like wishful thinking," he told AFP.

Americans think Trump is too keen on AI. Many use it already, but fear what it means for jobs and safety, and bristle at the rush to build massive data centers.

A Quinnipiac University poll found just 25% of voters back how the 80-year-old Republican is handling AI – 58% don't.

Cornell historian Ronald Kline told AFP "the phrase 'super intelligence' means more than simulating human intelligence, it means going beyond human intelligence."

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 at an austere summer workshop at Dartmouth College. Deliberately vague, it was chosen to bring mathematicians, psychologists and engineers under one banner, all chasing the same dream: teaching computers to "think" like humans.