Hinton, LeCun and Bengio used to be called the "godfathers of deep learning" which makes much more sense. I think this was after their Turing award, btw. At so

Hinton, LeCun and Bengio used to be called the "godfathers of deep learning" which makes much more sense. I think this was after their Turing award, btw. At some point, it seems someone switched to calling them the "godfathers of AI", possibly because that someone was writing an article for a lay audience who couldn't be expected to know what "deep learning" is, but would more certainly recognise "AI". Or maybe the someone (a journalist) was confused herself about the difference between "deep learning" and "AI" (and probably also "machine learning"), something that's very common. That's my best guess anyway. Who started this? It _may_ have been Forbes, or perhaps Forbes was one of the earliest users of the term: The trio — who have been nicknamed the "Godfathers of AI" (...) https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/27/the-3-godfathers-of-ai-have-won-the-prestigious-1m-turing-prize/?sh=1a6327bf549b https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/27/the-3-godfa... This is very tenuous but the reason I finger Forbes is because I found the article above linked from this Guardian interview with Hinton, presumably to justify calling Hinton "one of the godfathers of AI": Known as one of three “godfathers of AI”, (...) Hinton (...) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/05/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-fears-for-humanity https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/05/geoffrey-... The Guardian article was one in a series of pieces about Hinton leaving Google and warning of AI doom, that appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and other outlets, and that called Hinton "the godfather of AI". The first such article I read was this one, again by The Guardian: The man often touted as the godfather of AI (...) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-dangers-of-machine-learning https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-... I, too, was annoyed at the inaccuracy of this moniker and so I went on Twitter to ask Hinton to do something about it. He of course ignored my tweet, but the article with the Forbes link appeared soon after, so maybe Hinton took the hint, after all, or perhaps a Guardian columnist saw my tweet and decided to find some sort of reference for the moniker. Or maybe some other annoyed reader wrote to The Guardian directly and protested. Note the switch from "the godfather of AI" to "one of the three godfathers of AI" - clearly someone tried to do at least a bit of fact-checking, after the first Guardian article. But while it would be edifying if my tweet was at the root of this, I have no way to know it really was; it's just wishful thinking. Anyway the Forbes article seems to be an early user of the term, if not the originator.