DOJ Staff Must Refer to AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ in Court (1)

Right, so the Department of Justice has told its staff to call artificial intelligence "super intelligence" in court. Not "AI", not "machine learning", not "the software the defendant is being sued over" — "super intelligence", capital letters implied, in front of a federal judge. Bloomberg Law has the story, and the story is essentially the headline, which is at least admirably efficient. One does assume the memo was drafted by somebody who has never watched a district judge's face during a sanctions hearing.

Think about the practicalities for a moment. A DOJ lawyer rises and informs the bench that the matter before it is a super intelligence, and the judge — who has spent decades adjudicating the gap between a company's pitch deck and its actual product — nods and moves on. Bloomberg Law's piece carries the notation "(1)", which means the outlet anticipates more, presumably a numbered series cataloguing the many nouns the government would prefer we use about a technology it cannot audit, cannot benchmark and has not legislated. No definition, no reasoning, no named official, no date — just an instruction, which the piece reports and then leaves exactly where it found it.

The funny bit is the direction of travel. For years the labs promised they were building something world-historic, then quietly downgraded to "a helpful assistant" the moment anyone asked for evidence of the world-historic part. Now the enforcing arm of the US government has skipped the evidence entirely and gone straight to the branding, which saves everyone a great deal of time. And there is a real legal question lurking inside the label — if a system is formally declared super intelligent in open court, is it too clever to be held responsible for what it does, and are the humans merely passengers? DOJ presumably did not intend to make that argument. It has made it anyway, which is what happens when vocabulary is set by memo rather than by statute.