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/ˌɑːrtɪˈfɪʃəl ɪnˈtelɪdʒəns/
[noun] The ability of a computer or machine to do things that normally need human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images, or making decisions. The term is also used to describe the field of science that studies and builds such systems.
The phrase was coined at a summer workshop in 1956, making artificial intelligence younger than the Beatles.
To understand 'artificial intelligence', you need to pull the phrase apart and look at its two Latin roots separately, because each word carries centuries of history before they were joined together in a single summer in New Hampshire.
The word 'artificial' travels from the Latin artificialis, which itself comes from artificium, meaning 'skill', 'craft', or 'trade'. Artificium was built from two Latin parts: ars (genitive artis), meaning 'art' or 'skill', and facere, meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. So at its heart, 'artificial' simply meant 'made with skill' or 'made by craft'. Latin artificialis → Old French artificiel → Middle English artificial. When it entered English in the 14th century, it carried a broadly neutral meaning — something made by human hands or effort, as opposed to something found in nature. It was only gradually, over the following centuries, that the word picked up its modern shadow of inauthenticity, the sense that something artificial is lesser than something real.
'Intelligence' has an equally rich journey. It comes from the Latin intelligentia, meaning 'understanding', 'discernment', or 'the capacity to perceive'. That noun was formed from the verb intelligere, which broke down into inter- ('between') and legere ('to choose', 'to read', or 'to gather'). The idea embedded in the Latin root is striking: true intelligence was originally conceived as the ability to choose between things, to distinguish and select. Latin intelligentia → Old French intelligence → Middle English intelligence. The word entered English in the late 14th century and quickly developed two streams of meaning — the abstract quality of being clever, and the practical sense of information or news (as it is still used today in military or spy contexts).
The phrase 'artificial intelligence' as a technical term was born in the summer of 1956, at a now-legendary workshop held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The American mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy coined the phrase specifically for the proposal he submitted to organise the workshop. McCarthy chose the words deliberately: 'artificial' to signal that they were building something made by humans, and 'intelligence' to claim, ambitiously, that what they were building would genuinely think. Many of his colleagues preferred other terms — 'machine learning', 'automata theory', 'complex information processing' — but McCarthy's phrase stuck, partly because of its boldness and partly because of its elegant simplicity.
What makes the phrase philosophically interesting is precisely the tension hidden inside it. By the time McCarthy wrote it, 'artificial' had long carried the implication of something fake or inferior — an artificial flower is not a real flower. Joining it to 'intelligence', one of the most distinctly human qualities philosophers had ever named, created an immediate provocation: can something made by human hands truly possess understanding? That question, baked into the very grammar of the phrase, has driven decades of debate in philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science. The British mathematician Alan Turing had circled the same question six years earlier in his famous 1950 paper, asking 'Can machines think?' — he just never used the exact phrase.
Today, 'artificial intelligence' has spilled far beyond the walls of computer science departments. It appears in newspaper headlines, government policy documents, school curricula, and everyday conversation, often used loosely to describe anything from a simple recommendation algorithm to the most advanced large language models. The phrase carries an almost mythological weight now — evoking images of both utopian possibility and existential risk — a long journey from two dry Latin roots about craft and choosing between things.