Start reading the AI Snake Oil book online

The first chapter of the AI snake oil book is available online. It is 30 pages long and summarizes the book’s main arguments. If you haven't ordered the book yet, we hope that reading the introductory chapter will convince you to get yourself a copy.

Update (September 2025): It has been a year since the release of AI Snake Oil. In the time since its release, the two of us have given talks, appeared on podcasts, published exercises to accompany the book, and written a new preface and epilogue for the paperback edition of the book. The book was included in Nature’s list of the 10 best books of 2024, Bloomberg’s 49 best books of 2024, and Forbes’s 10 must-read tech books of 2024. It has received many positive reviews, including in the New Yorker. We are grateful to readers of the book for engaging deeply with its ideas.

We have now started working on our next project together, AI as Normal Technology. The project picks up where AI Snake Oil left off: whereas AI Snake Oil was an attempt to understand the present and near-term impacts of AI, AI as Normal Technology is a framework to think about its future impacts. The new name of this newsletter reflects this change. We hope you will follow along.

The single most confusing thing about AI

Our book is about demystifying AI, so right out of the gate we address what we think is the single most confusing thing about it: 

Because AI is an umbrella term, we treat each type of AI differently. We have chapters on predictive AI, generative AI, as well as AI used for social media content moderation. We also have a chapter on whether AI is an existential risk. We conclude with a discussion of why AI snake oil persists and what the future might hold. By AI snake oil we mean AI applications that do not (and perhaps cannot) work. Our book is a guide to identifying AI snake oil and AI hype. We also look at AI that is harmful even if it works well — such as face recognition used for mass surveillance. 

While the book is meant for a broad audience, it does not simply rehash the arguments we have made in our