‘AI Snake Oil’ author sees chatbots evolving into a ‘truth oracle’—and journalism heading somewhere it hasn’t been in 200 years

Arvind Narayanan thinks AI will come to feel more trustworthy—and it will remove the tells that let readers know they’re encountering AI slop in the wild. The Princeton computer scientist even predicts that these more accurate chatbots to come could become what many people treat as a “truth oracle.” Pew’s survey this year found that 10% of Americans are already doing this. Narayanan addressed the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center, where Fortune attended. The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop. His keynote was titled “AI and Journalism: Skating Where the Puck is Going.” He urged the audience to prepare for AI “not as it is today, but as it will be five or 10 years from now.” He said his computer science background is helpful in delineating which of today’s limits are fixable engineering problems and which are inherent. He has never worked in a newsroom, he noted. “It’s possible I…