Sayash Kapoor

"AI Snake Oil"

ABSTRACT -- AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In this talk I will discuss how AI 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 generative AI applications like ChatGPT, it's important to also beware of the rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describe 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. We will discuss the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own.

SPEAKER -- Sayash Kapoor is a Senior Fellow at Mozilla, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow in the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a coauthor of AI Snake Oil, one of Nature's 10 best books of 2024. His newsletter by the same name is read by over 50,000 AI enthusiasts, researchers, policymakers, and journalists. His work has been published in leading scientific journals such as Science and PNAS. He has written for mainstream outlets including The Wall Street Journal and WIRED and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and many others. Kapoor has been recognized with various awards, including a best paper award at ACM FAccT, an impact recognition award at ACM CSCW, and inclusion in TIME's inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Brent Warner, NASA-GSFC (retired)

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov