The phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined not in a paper or a manifesto but in a request for money. “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” dated August 31, 1955, was submitted by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon to the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a summer workshop. Its opening line proposed “a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.”
John McCarthy, then at Dartmouth, is credited with choosing the term “artificial intelligence” for the proposal, in part to distinguish the new field from the existing study of cybernetics and to avoid being subsumed under it. The label stuck, and the 1956 workshop it funded is now treated as the founding event of the field. A reformatted copy of the proposal is hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The name was chosen before the field had any results to show for it - a deliberate act of branding that has shaped public expectations, and arguments, ever since.