i. Why What WeWhy What We Call AI Is Actually Artificial Fluency.
KiTalent Research Papers · 2026 , published by KiTalent Research, 2026.
Artificial Intelligence Doesn't Exist argues that the term "artificial intelligence" has detached from the systems it now names. The phrase was coined in 1956 as the name of a research aspiration: the mechanization of intelligence itself. The systems we call AI today do not satisfy that aspiration. They are highly capable producers of language, and that capability is statistical and generative, not cognitive.
The paper proposes a more accurate description: artificial fluency. Large language models learn the statistical structure of public language and generate coherent, context-sensitive output. This is fluency, not the Dartmouth program of machine cognition. Treating fluency as evidence of understanding imports unsupported assumptions about judgment, reference, and responsibility , and human readers, formed by ordinary language to treat coherent speech as the expression of thought, supply the missing context themselves.
Across six chapters the book traces the misnaming from its historical source, describes what large language models actually do, distinguishes fluency from experience, examines the political economy that keeps the inflated term in circulation, documents the empirical harms in judgment-class domains, and makes the case for adopting "artificial fluency" as the accurate operating term.
