AI Snake Oil Audiobook By Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan cover art

AI Snake Oil

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

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AI Snake Oil

By: Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan
Narrated by: Landon Woodson
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About this listen

This audiobook narrated by Landon Woodson reveals what you need to know about AI—and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products

Comes with a bonus track featuring an illuminating discussion by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

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, 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.

©2024 Sayash Kapoor (P)2024 Princeton University Press
Computer Science History & Culture Technology & Society Thought-Provoking Technology Machine Learning
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Balanced Analysis • Insightful Read • Practical Tools • Comprehensive Overview • Evidence-based Discussions
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It felt like a sampling of hot topics in the lens of AI. Lots of examples cited, but they felt cherry picked for social interest.

I’m entertained at the amount of AI anti-hype.

For the hot topic focused AI skeptics

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Missed out on philosophy of Mind and how it plays into many of AI determinism notions being pushed by Ray Kurzweil et al.

Emphasis on AI limitations.

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The book lists many interesting cases of AI deployment, but feels too activist. There is a palpable effort to convince readers of the harms of AI. The title of the book is already misleading, as AI likens it to an unhelpful substance of snake oil, which AI surely is not. At the end of the chapters, there is no brief summary of what each chapter says.

Use of AI

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I have been beefing up on AI books lately but learned almost nothing from this one. The authors are obnoxious and self-important. They argue very poorly. They get facts wrong. They fail to cite obvious borrowing from other books, such as Bostrom's "Superintelligence". Hoping I can return this one--one of the many pieces of noise in the AI boom.

Mediocre

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This book was one of my most anticipated nonfiction reads of 2024, and it did not disappoint.
This book builds on conversations they have had on their blog, AI snake oil, which discusses the hype around AI and cuts through the bullshit. I highly recommend that you subscribe to their newsletter and definitely get this book.
I also highly recommend the audiobook because it contains a conversation between Arvind Narayanan and Sayesh Kapoor.

I appreciated the sensitivity with which they handled the audiobook narration conversation, especially given that I listened to this on Amazon, which has been trying to replace human narrators with AI generated content.

My best nonfiction read of 2024

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I loved this book. It should be required reading in all AI / ML courses. Irrational exuberance about AI will pass, like it has passed about stem cells, nanotechnologies, etc. And like before, we need to keep cool about real possibilities of AI and snake oil of AI.

Fantastic book!

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A good easy to unserstand take down of AI hyoe and why it will not solve human issue, such as content moderation

Essential

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I really enjoyed how they separated the different kinds of AI and what they are capable of, especially the real examples, of which some were horrific. I learned SO much about generative and predictive AI and the nuances. I hope they write more books on the subject and I will definitely sign up for their blog.

The unraveling of it all

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Would not recommend this book. Seemed very politically biased and focused on race quite a bit.

Meh, seemed like a political discourse much of the time.

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Authors provide a comprehensive overview of AI and why it’s so problematic in 2024.
It dispels myths and explains why there’s so much misinformation about AI. I recommend!

Timely, in-depth and accessible

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