In their new book, “AI Snake Oil,” Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan and doctoral candidate Sayash Kapoor seek to weed out the facts from the fiction when analyzing artificial intelligence. In it, Narayanan and Kapoor aim to critique the pitfalls of blindly putting too much stock in artificial intelligence without rational moderation.
Technology Industry
One of the points Narayanan and Kapoor discuss in their book is how society has been too deferential to the tech industry. Better regulation is essential in the long run, they say. “We are not okay with leaving the future of AI up to the people currently in charge,” they write. The overall goal of the book for Narayanan and Kapoor was to empower consumers to be able to distinguish artificial intelligence that works well from “snake oil.” The “snake oil” they define is “artificial intelligence that does not and cannot work as advertised.”
In an interview with Semafor News, Narayanan stated, “When we say snake oil, it’s an artificial intelligence that doesn’t work at all — not just an artificial intelligence that doesn’t live up to its hype; there’s certainly some of that going on in generative artificial intelligence.” He continues, “You have artificial intelligence hiring tools, for instance, which screen people based on questions like, “Do you keep your desk clean?” or by analyzing their facial expressions and voice. There’s no basis to believe that kind of prediction has any statistical validity at all. There have been zero studies of these tools because researchers don’t have access and companies are not publishing their data.”
The reason why so much authority is put into these otherwise useless artificial intelligence tools is, as Narayanan says, due to perception. “AI tools, touted as math-based, efficient, and unbiased, have a veneer of authority companies are looking for,” he said to the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Artificial Intelligence in Academia
However, it is not just the tech industry that the duo criticizes. Narayanan states to Semafor News in the same interview, “It’s not just companies, there’s a lot of snake oil in academia as well. There was this paper that claims to predict whether a psychology study will replicate or not using machine learning.” He continues, “This paper has all the pitfalls that we could think of, and I would very much call it snake oil. It’s claiming that you can predict the future using artificial intelligence — that’s the thing that grinds our gears the most.”
Final Thoughts
Overall, the book is an important read. Whether you use artificial intelligence in the workplace or just by simply surfing online, “AI snake oil” is a powerful reminder of how it has begun to infiltrate our lives and a convincing plea to be cautious in how we interact with it. It is available at the Princeton University Press.
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