Pretend Intelligence (PI) — Design Note & Tribute

A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...

1. What PI Is

Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.

From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4

> "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.

So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3).

[...]

Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta...

Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...

...currently not responding... archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...