This terminus technicus has been established since the 1960s, originally in the world of computer science and mathematics – an autochthonously technical concept, then, technical in this sense too. The birth of artificial intelligence was the so-called Dartmouth Conference. The AI pioneers John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon were the organizers of this event; their proposal for funding from the Rockefeller Foundation begins with the sentence: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." (McCarthy et al. 1955) Already in that first mood of departure, "artificial intelligence" was probably also meant literally. But even if the machine can simulate features of intelligence, the concept "artificial intelligence" is and remains a metaphor. Its basis is a simple relation of analogy: intelligence is to the human being as IT performance is to the IT machine; on the strength of this analogy, intelligence is then attributed to the IT machine and labelled "artificial intelligence". This is thus a metaphorical transfer exactly like the example Aristotle gives: "Old age is to life as evening is to day; so the poet calls evening 'the old age of the day', or old age 'the evening of life'." (Niedermair 2001, p. 144)

How should one deal with this metaphor? One can take it literally and thereby cement the fiction of artificial intelligence as reality. Or one can take the metaphorical, anthropomorphic language that shapes the public image of AI into view by means of a metaphor analysis (Niedermair 2001), reflect technology-critically (Niedermair 1998) on the mythologies, hypes and misunderstandings that have increased over the last two years in parallel with the rapid development of AI, and if necessary try to design an objective and clear language about AI as an alternative. Metaphors enrich language and extend our possibilities of knowledge; they can also lead us astray. There are problematic metaphors, and "artificial intelligence" is probably one of them. Presumably this metaphor established itself in order to give the AI machine a nice name, to make it socially acceptable, as it were, to present it as familiar and to conceal the fact that AI is actually also a mysterious black box. It is difficult to get rid of this metaphorical terminology. A terminological convention would therefore make sense: "'Artificial intelligence' is used as a terminus technicus for systems of machine information processing that model and simulate features of intelligence – such as learning, drawing inferences or understanding language." But whenever this concept could be meant literally and not merely metaphorically – which is suggested, for example, by lower-case spelling in German – I shall speak here of "so-called artificial" intelligence, for reasons of conceptual hygiene, because:

"AI decides, learns, acts, thinks etc., despite the corresponding semantic suggestions, just as little as an autonomous car is autonomous, as a robot could be forced to do something, or as computer scientists, AI researchers and data scientists would become creator gods by creating astonishing IT systems." (Gransche & Manzeschke 2024, p. 76)