Oracle · The Information · Fortune Technology
‘AI Snake Oil’ author sees chatbots evolving into a ‘truth oracle’—and journalism heading somewhere it hasn’t been in 200 years
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Arvind Narayanan thinks AI will come to feel more trustworthy—and it will remove the tells that let readers know they’re encountering AI slop in the wild.
Key facts
- Narayanan addressed the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center, which Fortune attended
- Arvind Narayanan thinks AI will come to feel more trustworthy—and it will remove the tells that let readers know they’re encountering AI slop in the wild
- Trade reporting, for instance, went to outlets like Politico, Punchbowl News, and Stat
- The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop
Summary
Narayanan addressed the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center, which Fortune attended. The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop. He broke his argument into two parts: If chatbots become the default place to settle factual questions—Narayanan said “virtually all” questions about, say, who is running for political office are headed there—the newsroom loses one more piece of its bundle, and arguably the most basic one. Narayanan directs Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, but he has emerged of late as a thought leader on AI, the future of work, and the media industry; he cowrote AI Snake Oil with Sayash Kapoor, and his newsletter, AI as Normal Technology, has over 87,000 subscribers. Narayanan said the common picture of chatbots as simple next-word predictors is outdated.