Artificial Intelligence as Snake Oil, Predicting the Past, or Why a Bicycle is not a Spaceship: Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (2024), AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 348

Abstract

With close reference to Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (2024), the author of this essay examines how artificial intelligence functions today and how it is perceived, often with a considerable dose of techno-enthusiasm. He distinguishes between predictive and generative AI, and presents hypotheses on how AI may operate in future societies.