Tuesday, June 3, 2025 | 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Join us for a virtual program with Princeton University professor and author Arvind Narayanan on AI Snake Oil. In his book, Narayanan and co-author Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion surrounding AI to give you an essential understanding of how it 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.
About the Author
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a co-author of the book AI Snake Oil and a newsletter of the same name which is read by 50,000 researchers, policy makers, journalists and AI enthusiasts. He previously co-authored two widely used computer science textbooks: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies and Fairness in Machine Learning. Narayanan led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. His work was among the first to show how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes. Narayanan was one of TIME's inaugural list of 100 most influential people in AI. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
This program is free, but advance registration is required. Registered guests will receive the link prior to the program. The first 100 guests will receive a FREE electronic copy of the book, courtesy of the Fordham Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis.
