The term “artificial intelligence” first appeared in a published document in 1955.
John McCarthy used the phrase in the 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The proposal was co-authored by Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, and it described a planned summer study of how machines might simulate aspects of human intelligence.
The Dartmouth workshop itself took place in 1956, which is why 1955 and 1956 are frequently confused. The 1955 document proposed the event and introduced the field name in print; the 1956 meeting is generally treated as the founding event of AI as an academic discipline.
The phrase was not a complete definition of intelligence. The proposal listed topics such as language use, neuron nets, theory of computation, and self-improvement. Its wording helped establish a common label for a broad research program that previously had been discussed under several different descriptions.