It's really sad how poor attribution is in ML. Hinton certainly made important contributions to backpropagation, but he neither invented backpropagation nor was he even close to the first person to use it for multilayer perceptrons.
You've now gone from one false claim "he literally invented backpropagation", to another false claim "he is one of the first people to use it for multilayer perceptrons", and will need to revise your claim even further.
I don't particularly blame you specifically, as I said the field of ML is so bad when it comes to properly recognizing the teams of people who made significant contributions to it.
This is a marketing problem fundamentally, I'd argue. That the article or any serious piece would use a term such as "Godfather of AI" is incredibly worrying and makes me think it's pushing an agenda or is some sort of paid advertisement with extra steps to disguise it.
I have grown an aversion, and possibly a knee-jerk reaction to such pieces. I have a lot of trouble taking them seriously, and I am inclined to give them a lot more scrutiny than otherwise.
You've now gone from one false claim "he literally invented backpropagation", to another false claim "he is one of the first people to use it for multilayer perceptrons", and will need to revise your claim even further.
I don't particularly blame you specifically, as I said the field of ML is so bad when it comes to properly recognizing the teams of people who made significant contributions to it.