{"id":6157,"date":"2026-10-06T22:09:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T22:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6157"},"modified":"2026-10-06T22:09:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T22:09:13","slug":"ai-snake-oil-author-sees-chatbots-evolving-into-a-truth-oracle-and-journalism-heading-somewhere-it-hasnt-been-in-200-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6157","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI Snake Oil\u2019 author sees chatbots evolving into a \u2018truth oracle\u2019\u2014and journalism heading somewhere it hasn\u2019t been in 200 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Arvind Narayanan thinks AI will come to feel more trustworthy\u2014and it will remove the tells that let readers know they\u2019re encountering AI slop in the wild. The Princeton computer scientist even predicts that these more accurate chatbots could become what many people treat as a \u201ctruth oracle.\u201d A Pew survey this year found that 10% of Americans are already doing this.<\/p>\n

\n

Narayanan addressed the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Northwestern\u2019s McCormick Foundation Center, which Fortune<\/em> attended. The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop. His keynote was titled \u201cAI and Journalism: Skating Where the Puck is Going.\u201d He urged the audience to prepare for AI \u201cnot as it is today, but as it will be five or 10 years from now.\u201d He said his computer science background is helpful in delineating which of today\u2019s limits are fixable engineering problems and which are inherent. He has never worked in a newsroom, he noted. \u201cIt\u2019s possible I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m talking about,\u201d he cautioned, before laying out a compelling argument.<\/p>\n

He broke his argument into two parts: If chatbots become the default place to settle factual questions\u2014Narayanan said \u201cvirtually all\u201d questions about, say, who is running for political office are headed there\u2014the newsroom loses one more piece of its bundle, and arguably the most basic one. What\u2019s left is the work a machine can\u2019t settle: contested questions, narrative, storytelling, and being explicit about what he called \u201cpositionality,\u201d a challenge for an industry that strives for objectivity.<\/p>\n

Narayanan directs Princeton\u2019s 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 cowrote AI Snake Oil<\/em> with Sayash Kapoor, and his newsletter, AI as Normal Technology<\/em>, has over 87,000 subscribers. Narayanan talked to Fortune<\/em> 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 \u201cskinny hamburger, fat bun\u201d problem, where the meat of execution shrinks down to almost nothing with the use of AI, while the decision and deliberation \u201cbuns\u201d swell, with a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty.<\/p>\n

The oracle and the slop<\/h2>\n

Narayanan said the common picture of chatbots as simple next-word predictors is outdated. Today\u2019s chatbots are \u201cneurosymbolic systems,\u201d he said: a language model plus tools that search the web, retrieve documents, and write code to analyze data. Errors that were common a year ago, such as miscounting the letters in \u201cstrawberry\u201d or Google\u2019s AI Overviews suggesting glue on pizza, now rarely occur. He called the remaining problems \u201cgradually getting solved.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then asked what happens when expectations catch up. His elementary-school-age children, he said, may never experience hallucination the way adults do, much as Wikipedia once went from an untrusted reference to a \u201cmuch more authoritative\u201d source. \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s inevitable. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a good thing,\u201d he said. On X, he noted, users already settle arguments by asking Grok, mostly conservatives with low trust in legacy media. He estimated the wider shift at about a decade out.<\/p>\n

A member of the audience ventured that chatbots can suffer from what press critic Jay Rosen famously called the \u201cview from nowhere\u201d for the false neutrality expressed by journalists reluctant to use their own judgment and properly inform the audience. Daniel Trielli of the University of Maryland asked about this danger, and Narayanan agreed, and said he sees that as a challenge for journalism to continue defining going forward.<\/p>\n

One of Narayanan\u2019s most contrarian claims was that agenda-setting by the media has backfired. The Washington Post<\/em>\u2018s role in Watergate was \u201can unalloyed good,\u201d he said, but cited research from \u201cmany communication scholars and economists\u201d showing that efforts to do the same in the Trump era, with audiences already splintered, have fed polarization and hastened the collapse of trust.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/div>
AI writing, Arvind Narayanan said, is \u201clargely a solvable technical problem.\u201d A model could be trained to mimic one writer almost perfectly, and detectors \u201cmight not work that well.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The unbundling<\/h2>\n

Narayanan said his talk was \u201cas much about the continuing effects of social media on newsrooms as it is about AI.\u201d The newsroom is now thought of as a single institution bundling reporting, analysis, fact-checking, and distribution, Narayanan noted, but he argued that this was a \u201chistorically contingent\u201d development and not a given going forward. The ad-supported penny papers of the 1830s broadened what counted as news because earlier papers lived on subscriptions and political patronage. Objectivity arose in response to World War I propaganda, and paid reporters and interviews also \u201chad to be invented.\u201d Calling someone a \u201chired reporter,\u201d he noted, was once an insult, \u201clike a hired gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Narayanan\u2019s framework draws on earlier debates. He quoted Clay Shirky\u2019s line that \u201csociety doesn\u2019t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,\u201d and said Paul Starr had warned, from the same era, that the loss of newspapers\u2019 economics would leave public goods like accountability unfunded. Starr has been proven right \u201cin many ways,\u201d Narayanan said, \u201cbut it\u2019s maybe not been as apocalyptic\u201d as feared, because philanthropy has stepped in.<\/p>\n

\n

His claim is that, piece by piece, specialists now do each job more cheaply than a newsroom can, and AI is hastening the process along. \u201cFor each of these components, there is kind of a competitor that produces this component in a more stand-alone way that is better structurally equipped just based on the economics of production,\u201d he said. Trade reporting, for instance, went to outlets like Politico, Punchbowl News, and Stat. Civic and local journalism has largely moved to a \u201cphilanthropy-funded model,\u201d he said, and investigations increasingly run on nonprofit money\u2014\u201ca reversion to historical patterns.\u201d Analysis, he stressed, has moved to independent journalists, social media creators, and \u201cpeople like me.\u201d Returning to what he called \u201cthe overarching point\u201d of his talk, he said that the idea of packaging everything together in a single newsroom \u201cis no longer the most economically viable way of producing news.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One of Narayanan\u2019s most contrarian claims was that agenda-setting by the media has backfired. The Washington Post<\/em>\u2018s role in Watergate was \u201can unalloyed good,\u201d he said, but there is evidence that efforts to do the same in the Trump era, with audiences already splintered, have fed polarization and hastened the collapse of trust. <\/p>\n

Analysis, as Narayanan defines it, is a \u201clayer that is between fact and opinion.\u201d Citing economics blogger Noah Smith, he argued that journalists have too long and too often treated this dividing line as binary, so the analysis layer \u201cnever really had a home in newsrooms.\u201d He offered the example of whether the AI industry is a bubble, as something an analysis could tackle. An analyst\u2019s authority, he argued, now comes from a body of work rather than a masthead. (Fortune<\/em> and Fortune Intelligence often run pieces as analysis, for what it\u2019s worth.)<\/p>\n

The internet \u201cdemocratized distribution,\u201d and AI is now \u201cdemocratizing production,\u201d he said: \u201cIt is now possible to produce first-rate journalistic content of various kinds with a one- or two-person team.\u201d It is \u201cnot so much a decline of news,\u201d he said, as \u201cthe migration toward a bunch of other institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who pays<\/h2>\n

The \u201creal crisis,\u201d Narayanan said, is the power gap between AI companies and publishers. Publishers need chatbot distribution more than AI firms need any one outlet, he said, so licensing deals underprice journalism.<\/p>\n

He pointed to the \u201cpivot to video,\u201d when a Facebook algorithm change forced news organizations to remake their business models, as \u201can awful illustration of the extreme power asymmetry.\u201d His fix is democratic input into how AI companies tune their algorithms\u2014something like Meta\u2019s Oversight Board, but with journalists having a \u201cseat at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Narayanan added that journalists need to form a broad political movement, banding together to advocate for the future of the profession, possibly including a tax on AI and social media companies. It would have to be \u201cbroad-based,\u201d not \u201cperceived as partisan,\u201d and include creators along with legacy outlets, he said.<\/p>\n

But the alternative, mostly unmentioned in the room, is that journalism is simply a phenomenon of the past two centuries and technology and economics are evolving away from it as an organized and aggregated industry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#Snake #Oil #author #sees #chatbots #evolving #truth #oracleand #journalism #heading #hasnt #years<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arvind Narayanan thinks AI wil… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4993,1632,5626,4830,9267,9266,610,717,9265,883,4992,4247,84],"class_list":["post-6157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-author","tag-chatbots","tag-evolving","tag-hasnt","tag-heading","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-oil","tag-oracleand","tag-sees","tag-snake","tag-truth","tag-years"],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018AI Snake Oil\u2019 author sees chatbots evolving into a \u2018truth oracle\u2019\u2014and journalism heading somewhere it hasn\u2019t been in 200 years - Finance News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=6157\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"zh_CN\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018AI Snake Oil\u2019 author sees chatbots evolving into a \u2018truth oracle\u2019\u2014and journalism heading somewhere it hasn\u2019t been in 200 years - 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