Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.
While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, why AI isn’t an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.
By revealing AI’s limits and real risks, AI Snake Oil will help you make better decisions about whether and how to use AI at work and home.
Join us for a talk by one of the authors, Dr. Arvind Narayanan, followed by an interview by Nabiha Syed, President of Mozilla Foundation, and a moderated Q&A.
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is the coauthor of AI Snake Oil and previously co-authored a textbook on fairness and machine learning. He led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. His work was among the first to show how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes, and his doctoral research showed the fundamental limits of de-identification. Narayanan is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Nabiha Syed is the President of Mozilla Foundation. Prior to Mozilla, Nabiha was the chief executive officer of The Markup, an award-winning journalism non-profit that challenges technology to serve the public good. She also spent a decade as an acclaimed media lawyer focused on the intersection of frontier technology and newsgathering, including advising on publication issues with the Snowden revelations and the Steele Dossier, access litigation around police disciplinary records, as well as privacy and free speech issues globally. Described by Forbes as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers,” she has briefed two presidents on free speech in the digital age, delivered the Salant Lecture at Harvard, headlined SXSW to discuss data privacy after Roe v. Wade, and was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights award in 2023 for her work.
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