
AI Snake Oil
Description
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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.
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Content
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface to the Paperback Edition
- 1. Introduction
- The Dawn of AI as a Consumer Product
- AI Shakes Up Entertainment
- Predictive AI: An Extraordinary Claim That Requires Extraordinary Evidence
- Painting AI with a Single Brush Is Tempting but Flawed
- A Series of Curious Circumstances Led to This Book
- The AI Hype Vortex
- What Is AI Snake Oil?
- Who This Book Is For
- 2. How Predictive AI Goes Wrong
- Predictive AI Makes Life-Altering Decisions
- A Good Prediction Is Not a Good Decision
- Opaque AI Incentivizes Gaming
- Overautomation
- Predictions about the Wrong People
- Predictive AI Exacerbates Existing Inequalities
- A World without Prediction
- Concluding Thoughts
- 3. Why Can't AI Predict the Future?
- A Brief History of Predicting the Future Using Computers
- Getting Specific
- The Fragile Families Challenge
- Why Did the Fragile Families Challenge End in Disappointment?
- Predictions in Criminal Justice
- Failure Is Hard. What about Success?
- The Meme Lottery
- From Individuals to Aggregates
- Recap: Reasons for Limits to Prediction
- 4. The Long Road to Generative AI
- Generative AI Is Built on a Long Series of Innovations Dating Back Eighty Years
- Failure and Revival
- Training Machines to "See
- The Technical and Cultural Significance of ImageNet
- Classifying and Generating Images
- Generative AI Appropriates Creative Labor
- AI for Image Classification Can Quickly Become AI for Surveillance
- From Images to Text
- From Models to Chatbots
- Automating Bullshit
- Deepfakes, Fraud, and Other Malicious Uses
- The Cost of Improvement
- Taking Stock
- 5. Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat?
- What Do the Experts Think?
- The Ladder of Generality
- What's Next on the Ladder?
- Accelerating Progress?
- Rogue AI?
- A Global Ban on Powerful AI?
- A Better Approach: Defending against Specific Threats
- Concluding Thoughts
- 6. Why Can't AI Fix Social Media?
- When Everything Is Taken Out of Context
- Cultural Incompetence
- AI Excels at Predicting . . . the Past
- When AI Goes Up against Human Ingenuity
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Now Add Regulation into the Mix
- The Hard Part Is Drawing the Line
- Recap: Seven Shortcomings of AI for Content Moderation
- A Problem of Their Own Making
- The Future of Content Moderation
- 7. Why Do Myths about AI Persist?
- AI Hype Is Different from Previous Technology Hype
- The AI Community Has a Culture and History of Hype
- Companies Have Few Incentives for Transparency
- The Reproducibility Crisis in AI Research
- News Media Misleads the Public
- Public Figures Spread AI Hype
- Cognitive Biases Lead Us Astray
- 8. Where Do We Go from Here?
- AI Snake Oil Is Appealing to Broken Institutions
- Embracing Randomness
- Regulation: Cutting through the False Dichotomy
- Limitations of Regulation
- AI and the Future of Work
- Growing Up with AI in Kai's World
- Growing Up with AI in Maya's World
- Epilogue to the Paperback Edition
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Index
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