Is the future of AI in health care just a lot of hype?

Anne Thompson

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Sayash Kapoor poses for a portrait with lots of green foliage in the background whild wearing a pinstripes, shortsleeved button down shirt and black glasses. -- health cverage from STAT — Sayash Kapoor, co-author of ‘AI Snake Oil.’Courtesy David Kelly Crow

By Anil Oza

Oct. 10, 2024

Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellow

Amid excitement over everything from Chat-GPT to Nobel Prize-winning chemistry research that uses artificial intelligence to predict protein structures, academics Arvind Narayan and Sayash Kapoor have established a reputation for throwing cold water on at least some of the claims about how AI will transform people’s lives.

Narayan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, went viral in 2019 for a talk he gave at MIT on how to recognize overblown declarations about AI’s capabilities. Now he’s teamed up with his Ph.D. student Kapoor to publish the book “AI Snake Oil,” which came out Sep. 24. While the book encourages skepticism about many AI claims, the pair consider themselves cautiously optimistic about the future of the technology — including as it pertains to health care.

“It’s easy to look at all the flaws and misuses of chatbots and conclude that the world has gone mad for being so gaga about a technology that is so failure prone,” they write in the book. “But that conclusion would be too simplistic.”

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