FAQ about the book and our writing process
AI Snake Oil Arvind Narayanan
The authors of the AI Snake Oil book addressed frequently asked questions about their work, which sold approximately 8,000 copies since its September 2024 publication. The book distinguishes between predictive AI (which they critique as unreliable for human behavior forecasting) and generative AI (which they view as broadly positive but currently chaotic in rollout), and took roughly five years from initial thesis development in 2019 to final publication, including six to eight rounds of editing per chapter. The authors rejected alignment with polarized AI discourse camps (safety, e/acc, or ethics communities) in favor of evidence-based analysis that acknowledges both materialized harms and catastrophic risks without apocalyptic or utopian framing.
Why it matters
What's in the book and how we wrote it
