Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy @princetoncitp.bsky.social · 12d

📢📢 Call for federal employees for the AI Precepts in Washington, DC. Learn from experts Arvind Narayanan (@randomwalker.bsky.social), Mihir Kshirsagar, Peter Henderson (@peterhenderson.bsky.social, & Sayash Kapoor (@sayash.bsky.social). Deadline to apply: Fri, Oct. 3

mailchi.mp/princeton.ed...

Invitation to Apply: Princeton AI Policy Precepts in Washington, DC

mailchi.mp

1 1 1

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 15d

From two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about #AI—and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products.

AI Snake Oil by @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social is now available in #paperback: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Paperback cover of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

1 3 10

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 29d

Our #podcast series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit continues with Arvind Narayanan who explores the subject of bullshit in #AI.

press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-tr...

@randomwalker.bsky.social @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social @calebzakarin.bsky.social

5 13

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy @princetoncitp.bsky.social · Sep 3

📣 Prof Arvind Narayanan (@randomwalker.bsky.social) is hiring a Princeton University undergrad for a Video Editor & Production Assistant this semester to help with his brand new YouTube channel @ArvindOnAI

Getting started right away so feel free to comment + share with students! Link to apply 👇

1 3 1

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · Aug 19

Even superintelligent AI cannot simply replace humans for most of what we do, nor can it perfect or ruin our world unless we let it, AI Snake Oil’s @randomwalker.bsky.social tells EFF’s Cindy Cohn and @thejasonkelley.com on the new “How to Fix the Internet.”

Podcast Episode: Separating AI Hope from AI Hype

If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the w...

www.eff.org

1 14 31

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Katy Glenn Bass @katygb.bsky.social · Aug 15

Great @eff.org podcast with @randomwalker.bsky.social, touching on his AI as Normal Technology paper w/ @sayash.bsky.social for our @knightcolumbia.org AI & Democratic Freedoms project. Short 🧵 of a few other papers related to this podcast discussion:
www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Podcast Episode: Separating AI Hope from AI Hype

If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the w...

www.eff.org

1 7 17

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

rainey reitman @reitman.bsky.social · Aug 12

Preach it, @randomwalker.bsky.social.

I've worked with so many nonprofits, and I think an organically-grown newsletter community is so, so valuable. It takes time, but it's worth it. substack.com/@aisnakeoil/...

Arvind Narayanan (@aisnakeoil)

Some people have asked me about the decision to start a newsletter rather than using other channels like op-eds. There's one key thing I've learned, and I made a stylized chart to explain it. If you b...

substack.com

1 3

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · Jul 31

What kind of AI governance do we need? Our new piece in @science.org answers this: we need policy grounded in evidence and built to generate more of it. Evidence-based policymaking is not a slogan—it’s a design challenge for democratic governance in the age of AI www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵

Advancing science- and evidence-based AI policy

Policy must be informed by, but also facilitate the generation of, scientific evidence

www.science.org

7 55 130

Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · Jul 18

Note that the data collection ended right before ChatGPT was released, so my guess is that the percentages are no longer small.

3

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Anshul Kundaje @anshulkundaje.bsky.social · Jul 17

Fabulous post by @randomwalker.bsky.social & Sayash raising the same concern many of us have about whether we're on the right track with how we're using AI for science. Everyone should read it, take a deep breath & think through the implications.

www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-s...

Could AI slow science?

Confronting the production-progress paradox

www.aisnakeoil.com

7 71 160

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Fago Milfoy @dia.bsky.social · Jul 10

I’m reading a very well written 2023 paper on social media recommender systems from @randomwalker.bsky.social I had completely forgotten that in the 00s “neither Facebook nor Twitter had the ability to reshare or retweet posts in your feed.”What a huge shift!

knightcolumbia.org/content/unde...

Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms

knightcolumbia.org

3 2

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

zeynep tufekci @zey.bsky.social · Jun 20

We’re hiring at Princeton on AI and society, working with Arvind Narayanan or me depending on fit.

I think current AI developments are all a huge deal but am very unexcited by current state of the AGI and/or AI safety discourse.

Please share as you see fit.

puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

puwebp.princeton.edu

2 51 83

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · May 26

After consideration, I will post occasionally, but heavily censor what I share compared to other sites.

I tried making the transition, but talking about AI here is just really fraught in ways that are tough to mitigate & make it hard to have good discussions (the point of social!). Maybe it changes

76 25 430

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · May 28

For @newyorker.com, Joshua Rothman spoke with @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social, authors of AI Snake Oil and a recently published paper “AI as Normal Technology”, which argues that practical obstacles will slow AI’s uses and potential: www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

Two Paths for A.I.

The technology is complicated, but our choices are simple: we can remain passive, or assert control.

www.newyorker.com

1 3 17

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · May 22

clear, depressing set of observations from @randomwalker.bsky.social - "The decline of reading-for-pleasure (due to video) and reading-for-information (due to AI) will accelerate each other, as reading text without an intermediary will come to be seen as a chore."

"A hypothesis on the accelerating decline of reading:

* Broadly speaking, people read for pleasure/entertainment and for learning/obtaining information.
* Reading for pleasure has been declining for a while and is being replaced by videos (very sharply among young people). This trend will surely continue.
* Reading for obtaining information is getting intermediated by chatbots. We are in the very early stages of this shift, so I think people underappreciate the magnitude of what's coming. It's not just that AI replacing traditional web search. Even when it comes to reading news articles, business documents, or scientific papers, the vision that tech companies are pushing on us is AI summarization + synthesis + Q&A.
* We don't have to accept this, but I predict that most people will. It's a tradeoff between speed/convenience and accuracy/depth of understanding — the same tradeoff that was once offered to us when it became possible to search the web to look up a quick fact as opposed to reading about the topic in depth in an encyclopedia.
* Just as most people in most cases prefer a shallow web search over deeper reading, most people in most cases will prefer AI-intermediated access to knowledge. Traditional reading won't disappear, but people will do it vastly less often, except in hobbyist reading communities and professions where traditional reading is needed.
* The decline of reading-for-pleasure (due to video) and reading-for-information (due to AI) will accelerate each other, as reading text without an intermediary will come to be seen as a chore.
* Personally, I find this sad. But while it's tempting to moralize all this, I think that's unproductive. Yelling at individuals to resist new media has been done for centuries and has never worked.
* Even if people individually rationally choose these tradeoffs, I think we collectively lose something; critical reading skills are arguably essential for a democracy. We need to figure out what to do about that.

14 110 330

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen @lorenzspreen.bsky.social · May 15

New preprint with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @randomwalker.bsky.social @orbenamy.bsky.social @lfoswaldo.bsky.social where we argue for a complex-system perspective to understand the causal effects of social media on society and for a triangulation of methods
arxiv.org/abs/2505.09254

Moving towards informative and actionable social media research

Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, and concerns have been raised about its putative societal impacts, ranging from undermining mental health and exacerbating polarization to fomenting v...

arxiv.org

2 28 76

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · May 6

I'm excited that I can finally share what I've been working on for the past 9 months:

The United Nations 2025 Human Development Report: "A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI" 🧵

hdr.undp.org/content/huma...

6 28 110

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Neil Turkewitz @neilturkewitz.bsky.social · May 1

“AGI is not a milestone because it is not actionable. A company declaring it has achieved, or is about to achieve, AGI has no implications for how businesses should plan, what safety interventions we need, or how policymakers should react.”
@randomwalker.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/aisnakeo...

AGI is not a milestone

There is no capability threshold that will lead to sudden impacts

open.substack.com

1 1 6

Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · Apr 26

Hi, if you mean my conversation with @melaniemitchell.bsky.social I shared the transcript here: blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/04/02/a...

A Guide to Cutting Through AI Hype: Arvind Narayanan and Melanie Mitchell Discuss Artificial and Human Intelligence - CITP Blog

Last Thursday’s Princeton Public Lecture on AI hype began with brief talks based on our respective books: The meat of the event was a discussion between the two of us and with the audience. A lightly ...

blog.citp.princeton.edu

1 2 3

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · Apr 24

Okay just started @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social's new essay and this is 🔥🔥🔥.

"Resilience as the overarching approach to catastrophic risk" -- yes thank you exactly this.

kfai-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/c3...

1 2 13

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence @princetonainews.bsky.social · Apr 24

We are hosting @reproml.org 2025 on Aug. 21. There will be invited talks, oral presentations, and poster sessions. Keynote speakers include @randomwalker.bsky.social, @soumithchintala.bsky.social, @jfrankle.com, @jessedodge.bsky.social, @stellaathena.bsky.social

Register now: bit.ly/4cP8vIq

text says "ML Reproducibility Challenge Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, August 21 2025"

1 1

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

MIT Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work @mitshapingwork.bsky.social · Apr 24

In this clip from our event last week, @randomwalker.bsky.social describes how we can map out the landscape of AI along two dimensions: how well the AI tool works, and how harmful (or benign) it is.

Watch a full recording of the event: youtu.be/C3TqcUEFR58

1 4 12

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · Apr 19

IMO, the most important piece on AI of the last 6 months and I recommend it to everyone. A genuinely careful consideration of the technology and its intersections with culture and labor from @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social Authors of AI Snake Oil substack.com/home/post/p-...

AI as Normal Technology

A new paper that we will expand into our next book

substack.com

4 26 100

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

M. Alessandro 🇨🇦 @manfrommolise.bsky.social · Apr 17

Truly thoughtful and essential analysis of the AI field from @randomwalker.bsky.social @sayash.bsky.social. States what many felt, but haven't articulated. Pairs well with Shazeda Ahmed's "epistemic culture of AI safety" and others' work on risk and anti-trust.

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

AI as Normal Technology

knightcolumbia.org

1 1 5

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · Apr 15

In a new essay from our "Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms" series, @randomwalker.bsky.social & @sayash.bsky.social make the case for thinking of #AI as normal technology, instead of superintelligence. Read here: knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

AI as Normal Technology

knightcolumbia.org

1 17 38