Daily Archives:December 14th, 2019

How to detect AI snake oil

This is a great set of slides by Arvind Narayanan of Princeton, on the dangers of assuming that current AI, powerful though it is, can make much in the way useful predictions when it comes to complex social factors.

His key claim:

For predicting social outcomes, AI is not substantially better than manual scoring using just a few features.

It would be nice if he had more than one example in the talk, but the one he’s picked is a good one, and these are very readable slides.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser