AI Snake Oil
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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
Includes a new preface and epilogue by the authors
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.
Customer Reviews
Good review on AI limitations.
Good points arvind and sayash.
To arvind and sayash: if you are reading this, I would really suggest broadening your horizon which includes medicine, consciousness, life , history etc. I am sure you guys have enough exposure to tech world. If you add more details about numbers and frequencies of the errors, it would give readers a better perspective. Also add details about why you have this opinion. E.g. it's not good for prediction models. You gave one example but then, what was the prediction rate of sepsis before AI models. (It was worse)... as a doctor, we like to predict things for our patients and whatever we have learnt in past 50 years is very bad. We have relied on straight lines of regression models... and very few features that we used to predict. AI does offers better respite but understand that medicine is complex and you need to input many more(honestly we possibly know less than 5% of medicine except in few areas where we know more)... so how will any prediction model work. So the reason that AI is not going to be great is because we don't have enough information. On contrary, it's great for protein folding since there are strict laws that governs these interactions. So it's going to do really well. Will wait for your second edition.
To readers: these are good points and examples. Would have liked more intrinsic details about the opinions rather than 'it's our opinion'. But overall an amazing book.