No amount of renaming can fix AI's growing reputation problem.

It's the oldest branding trick in the book. If your product has a reputation problem, just change the name. Simple!

In 2000, the California Prune Board persuaded the authorities to allow prunes to be called "dried plums". More recently, Patagonian toothfish have become known as Chilean Sea Bass. (Be honest, which would you order in a restaurant?)

Similarly, political strategists in the early 2000s such as Frank Luntz advised conservatives to use the term "climate change" instead of "global warming" because it sounded less alarming.

So I wasn't entirely surprised when a few days ago, Elon Musk took issue with a term people have started using to describe AI music. "Calling it slopcore is a misnomer," he said. "Frankly, it's awesomecore."

No, he's serious

It sounds like a joke, but the owner of X was deadly serious. And it echoes recent attempts by President Trump to rebrand "artificial intelligence" as "super intelligence". He even declared on Truth Social that anyone who still says "artificial intelligence" should be considered "THE ENEMY!"

As a journalist, words are my bread and butter, and I've spent 30 years keeping track of this stuff. In the same way people remember what they were doing on 9/11, I remember when Philip Morris became Altria, when Windscale became Sellafield, and when Royal Mail briefly became Consignia (before everyone laughed and it changed back).

All these stories point to the same clear lesson. It's rare to rebrand something that's going well. A new name is usually a sign that the old one has become toxic.

Here's the truth

That, then, is the deeper truth here. The people pushing AI hardest are starting to wake up to the fact that the public isn't buying it. And I'm not talking about conspiracy nuts, the kind of people who spend their whole life lurking on Reddit. I mean the actual general public, all of us, in our billions.

I've yet to meet anyone who likes AI music, even though many of us have been tricked into listening to it. Nor do data centres seem to have many fans, regardless of people's political leanings. In the US, a national Gallup survey found 70% of Americans were opposed to them being built in their communities. And according to Data Center Watch, some 45 data centre projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed by local pushback between April and June.

A sign they're losing

For those of us who work in a creative profession, there's something reassuring in all this. The AI-boosting elite know they're losing the argument. If they were winning, they wouldn't need new words.

That's not to say I'm an AI luddite. But to my mind, there's a big difference between a tool that helps you work and a flood of autogenerated content that's drowning out real creative voices. Thankfully, ordinary people are increasingly able to tell the difference, they're calling out slop, and it's making the elites realise they can't just do what they like.

A good brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Right now, what they're saying is "slop". Elon can call it awesomecore all he likes. But ultimately, he just sounds like an unpopular schoolkid trying to give themselves a cool nickname: very desperate indeed.

Tom May is an award-winning journalist specialising in art, design, photography and technology. He is the author of the books The 50 Greatest Designers (Arcturus) and Great TED Talks: Creativity (Pavilion). Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.