How Much You Can Trust This Site

Many famous stories in the history of AI read differently once you look at the original source. The words were shortened, the conditions behind them were dropped, and the claim grew stronger as it spread. This site cares most about going back to the original sources and checking again. It protects trust in three stages.

1. A confidence grade for every event

Every one of the 435 events and predictions on this site comes with the place in the original source (the page or paragraph) and a label showing how far we were able to check it (the confidence grade).

Verified in the original We opened the original source (a paper, a book, a report, a news article from the time, a record kept by the organizers or the company that built the system, a government document) and checked the exact page or paragraph. 395 events (91%).
Confirmed in summaries We could not open the original (it is behind a paywall, exists only on paper, and so on). We checked that two or more reliable summaries (pages from academic societies, museums, universities and governments, history books, encyclopedias) say the same thing.
Weakly confirmed Checked against only one summary.
Anything based only on memory or guesswork is not included as an event. (If the "what happened next" part of a prediction contains some guesswork, we say so.)
Sources disagree The sources give different years, numbers or wordings. We do not pick one side; we write both.

A memoir written by someone involved many years later is a kind of original source, but memory can be wrong, so we mark it separately as "the person's own later recollection."

2. A ledger of every quotation

In the text of this site, anything put in quotation marks as the words of a person or a source is one of the following.

The exact words of a Japanese source (when it is long, we cut the middle with "…")
A translation of the words of a source that is not in Japanese (we also let you see a short excerpt of the original words)
The name of a term (, , and so on) or the title of a book, paper or plan

When we have put something into our own words, we do not use quotation marks. We write it like "wrote something to the effect that…". Popular stories are written in the form "it tends to be said that…," never as the words of a particular person.

There is a ledger that gathers every quotation together with the original words and the place in the source where they appear; it has 2,401 rows. Press a colored quotation mark to see its row. We took care that translations do not make the meaning stronger or weaker (for example, if the original says "might," we do not turn it into "will").

3. Checked by machine, too

A program checks whether the Japanese inside quotation marks really appears in the text of the saved source. A program also checks that the ledger is complete and that every translation comes with the original words. For old sources whose text cannot be extracted (for example, PDFs that are only images), we turned the pages into pictures, checked them by eye, and noted that we did so.

Words change a little as they spread

Compared with the original sources, you can see how words change shape little by little as they spread. Here are some examples we found and fixed while building this site (714 rows in the ledger). For example:

A 1985 explanation in the National Diet had been put in quotation marks as "now the second boom," but the words in the official record were (translated from the Japanese).
Shannon's 1950 outlook had been described as "composing music," but what the paper described was adding accompaniment to an existing melody (arranging).
A 2015 declaration by the Information Processing Society of Japan had been written as "caught up," but the original words were (translated from the Japanese).
In a 2016 talk by Geoffrey Hinton about radiologists, the words he used were not "AI" but (we checked this with the video's automatic captions, not by ear).
In several translations of English sentences, a "might" had dropped out and the sentence had become a flat statement.

How to check for yourself

Open "the original sources and where we checked" on an event card. You will find the title, page and link of each source. Please open the links and check with your own eyes.
When sources disagree, check which one is closer to the original information (a source from the time, or a summary written many years later).
Japan's high-school curriculum guidelines for Information (the required informatics subject) ask every subject to "develop the ability to judge and secure the reliability and credibility of information." Each event on this site is practice material for building that skill.

What we still don't know

Where we could not trace something back to an original source, or where a disagreement between sources has not been settled, the event card says so. What we still don't know is an entrance for the next person who investigates.

Using this site's text and figures

This site's text, interactive figures, Python programs and event ledger are published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone can use them freely by giving the name “**All History of AI (aTELiER FACTORY)**” and this site's web address. You can use them in classroom handouts and slides, school assignments, books and articles, materials for work, and adaptations or translations. You do not need to let us know in advance.

Example credit: Source: “All History of AI” (aTELiER FACTORY), https://atelierfactory.jp/ai-history/, CC BY 4.0
If you make changes, please say that you have done so.
Words quoted from original sources and other people's data (such as Epoch AI's data) belong to their respective owners. When you use them, follow the terms of those sources.

Full license terms: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ja