How far back do I have to look, and what definition do you use? Because I can start with theorem provers and chess engines of the 1950s.

Nothing in that list is based on humans, even remotely. Only neural networks were a vague form of biomimicry early on and currently have academic biomimicry approaches, of which all suck because they poorly map to available semiconductor manufacturing processes. Attention is misleadingly called that, reasoning is ill-defined, etc.

LLMs are trained on human-produced data, and ML in general shares many fundamentals and emergent phenomena with biological learning (a lot more than some people talking about "token predictors" realize). That's it. Producing artificial humans or imitating real ones was never the goal nor the point. We can split hairs all day long, but the point of AI as a field since 1950s is to produce systems that do something that is considered only doable by humans.

> How far back do I have to look

The earliest reference I know off the top of my head is Aristotle, which would be the 4th century BCE

> I can start with theorem provers

If you're going to talk about theorem provers, you may want to include the medieval theory of obligations and their game-semantic-like nature. Or the Socratic notion of a dialogue in which arguments are arrived at via a back and forth. Or you may want to consider that "logos" from which we get logic means "word". And if you contemplate these things for a minute or two you'll realize that logic since ancient times has been a model of speech and often specifically of speaking with another human. It's a way of having words (and later written symbols) constrain thought to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Chess is another kind of game played between two people. In this case it's a war game, but that seems not so essential. The essential thing is that chess is a game and games are relatively constrained forms of reasoning. They're modeling a human activity.

By 1950, Alan Turing had already written about the imitation game (or Turing test) that evaluated whether a computer could be said to be thinking based on its ability to hold a natural language conversation with humans. He also built an early chess system and was explicitly thinking about artificial intelligence as a model of what humans could do.

> Attention is misleadingly called that, reasoning is ill-defined,

None of this dismissiveness bears on the point. If you want to argue that humans are not the benchmark and model of intelligence (which frankly I think is a completely indefensible position, but that's up to you) then you have to argue that these things were not named or modeled after human activities. It's not sufficient that you think their names are poorly chosen.

> Producing artificial humans or imitating real ones was never the goal nor the point.

Artificial humans is exactly the concept of androids or humanoid robots. You are claiming that nobody has ever wanted to make humanoid robots? I'm sure you can't believe that but I'm at a loss for what point you're trying to make.

> 1950s is to produce systems that do something that is considered only doable by humans.

Unless this is a typo and you meant to write that this was NOT the goal, then you're conceding my point that humans are the benchmark and model for AI systems. They are, after all, the most intelligent beings we know to exist at present.

And so to reiterate my original point, talking about AI with the constraint that you can't compare them to humans is totally insane.