Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan says chatbots could become ‘truth oracles’
The AI Snake Oil co-author told journalists to prepare for AI that has lost the flaws that make it easy to spot today
The man who co-wrote a book called AI Snake Oil now expects chatbots to become something many people treat as gospel.
Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan told a room full of journalists that AI tools could grow into what he called “truth oracles” within five to ten years.
What Narayanan told the room
Narayanan gave the keynote at the Computation + Journalism 2026 Symposium. The event took place at Northwestern University’s McCormick Foundation Center on October 2-3, 2026.
His talk came on the second day. Fortune was in the audience.
The address carried the title “AI and Journalism: Skating Where the Puck is Going.”
His central request was simple. Newsrooms should prepare for AI “not as it is today,” he said, and plan instead for the version arriving five to ten years from now.
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At the moment, plenty of readers can still spot machine-written text. It invents facts. It writes in a recognizable voice. It also struggles to personalize itself convincingly.
Narayanan’s view is that those weaknesses are temporary. As the models improve, the giveaways fade, and AI output starts to feel credible instead of suspect.
One in ten Americans is already there
A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 10% of Americans treat chatbots as authoritative sources of truth in some contexts.
Pew questioned 5,119 US adults between February 17 and 23, 2026. In the same survey, 29% of respondents named chatbots as the thing they most associate with AI.
The rest of the symposium circled similar worries. The agenda covered the pressures on the media business and the spread of AI slop, the cheap machine-made content that now fills large parts of the internet.
Discussions centered on how AI changes journalism and how outlets keep public trust.
A skeptic’s forecast
Narayanan’s remedy was more expertise. He urged journalists to build the knowledge needed to oversee what flows through AI systems. He argued that the profession has to evolve in step with the technology it covers.