The cult of Fei-Fei Li misrepresents her role in artificial intelligence, framing her as the visionary creator of ImageNet and the "benevolent mother of computer vision," a narrative that is "deeply misleading." ImageNet was not a divine spark but a "brute-force statistical hack" and a "massive data labeling exercise" that taught computers to categorize pixels, not understand visual concepts. The 2012 arrival of AlexNet caused the engineering community to wrongly believe general AI was imminent, leading companies to burn through "eight-figure seed rounds" on hyper-specific datasets that never acquire common sense. This approach trapped the field in a "local maximum," producing brittle systems easily fooled by a single pixel shift and devoid of causal reasoning. ImageNet solved pattern matching for a constrained slice of internet imagery, not comprehension, and conflating the two is the "original sin" of machine learning. The "Human-Centered AI" branding is a marketing ploy invented when academia faces backlash over algorithmic bias, privacy violations, or labor exploitation. Li founded the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, but the article argues this label is a comforting buzzword rather than a substantive solution. The romanticized origin story has warped how the tech industry builds systems, causing projects to implode when PR mythology is confused with technical reality.