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AI Snake Oil
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AI Snake Oil

What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference


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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Scientific
  • Eye Opening

Recommendation

It’s time to differentiate between AI’s real capacities and the overhyped promises of Big Tech, say Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan and PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor. Just as salesmen once sold snake oil as a “miracle cure” when, in reality, it had no medical benefits, people today are exaggerating AI’s potential. For instance, AI tools cannot give humanity perfect insight into future events — but they can lead to poor decision-making. Narayanan and Kapoor call on you to fight for the AI future you want, rather than accepting the future tech companies are trying to sell you.

Summary

Predictive AI’s abilities are vastly exaggerated.

Decision-makers, governments and companies are pushing to replace human decision-making with predictive AI analytics. There’s just one catch: AI tools don’t always work as advertised. For example, Medicare providers in the United States have started turning to predictive AI to estimate how long patients will spend in the hospital. However, these estimates are not always accurate and can undercut the quality of care patients receive. In one alarming case, an AI tool predicted that an 85-year-old would only need to spend 17 days in the hospital. The patient’s health insurance company, taking the prediction as fact, stopped funding treatment after that many days, even though the patient still couldn’t walk without assistance and remained in extreme pain.

False promises about the potential of AI to make accurate predictions abound. For example, both Scientific American and Axios published stories touting a 2023 paper that contained the false assertion that AI could predict future hit songs with nearly 100% accuracy. However, the study’s results...

About the Authors

Arvind Narayanan is the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy and a professor of computer science at Princeton. Sayash Kapoor is a PhD candidate with the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.


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