‘AI Snake Oil’ author sees chatbots evolving into a ‘truth oracle’—and journalism heading somewhere it hasn’t been in 200 years

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. The Princeton computer scientist even predicts that these more accurate chatbots to come could become what many people treat as a “truth oracle.” Pew’s survey this year found that 10% of Americans are already doing this.

Narayanan addressed the Computation Journalism Symposium at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center, where Fortune attended. The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop. His keynote was titled “AI and Journalism: Skating Where the Puck is Going.” He urged the audience to prepare for AI “not as it is today, but as it will be five or 10 years from now.” He said his computer science background is helpful in delineating which of today’s limits are fixable engineering problems and which are inherent. He has never worked in a newsroom, he noted. “It’s possible I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he cautioned, before laying out a compelling argument.

He broke his argument intwo 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. What’s left is the work a machine can’t settle: contested questions, narrative, storytelling and being explicit about what he called “positionality,” a challenge for an industry that strives for objectivity.

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 co-wrote AI Snake Oil with Sayash Kapoor and his newsletter AI as Normal Technology has over 87,000 subscribers. Narayanan talked to Fortune in August about the AI backlash, which he sees as a complicated thing, and expanded on his insight into why productivity and return on investment has been so hard to measure or even nonexistent. He calls this a “skinny hamburger, fat bun” problem, where the meat of execution shrinks down to almost nothing with the use of AI, while the decision and deliberation “buns” swell, with a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty.

The oracle and the slop

Narayanan said the common picture of chatbots as simple next-word predictors is outdated. Today’s chatbots are “neurosymbolic systems,” he said: a language model plus tools that search the web, retrieve documents and write code to analyze data. Errors that........

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