Incidentally, McCarthy’s own mentor and the father of information theory, Claude Shannon, disagreed with the term. According to McCarthy, Shannon felt that “too flashy a term might attract unfavourable notice”. However, McCarthy decided to stick with the term as he felt it would help attract more attention and funding.
Not many people know this, but the term “artificial intelligence” or AI was created for marketing purposes, just like how Goldman Sachs came up with “Brics” to highlight the potential of emerging market players like Brazil, Russia, India and China.
American computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term AI in 1956 while he was an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. “I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study,” McCarthy said during a debate held at the Royal Institution of London in 1973.
