Arvind Narayanan thinks AI will come to feel more trustworthy—and it will remove the tells that let readers know they’re encountering AI slop in the wild. The Princeton computer scientist even predicts that these more accurate chatbots could become what many people treat as a “truth oracle.” A Pew survey this year found that 10% of Americans are already doing this. Narayanan addressed the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center, which Fortune attended. The agenda included the challenges facing media and proliferation of AI slop. His keynote was titled “AI and Journalism: Skating Where the Puck is Going.” He urged the audience to prepare for AI “not as it is today, but as it will be five or 10 years from now.” He said his computer science background is helpful in delineating which of today’s limits are fixable engineering problems and which are inherent. He has never worked in a newsroom, he noted. “It’s possible I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he cautioned, before laying out a compelling argument. He broke his argument into two parts: If chatbots become the default place to settle factual questions—Narayanan said “virtually all” questions about, say, who is running for political office are headed there—the newsroom loses one more piece of its bundle, and arguably the most basic one. What’s left is the work a machine can’t settle: contested questions, narrative, storytelling, and being explicit about what he called “positionality,” a challenge for an industry that strives for objectivity. Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/06/arvind-narayanan-journalism-future-ai-slop-oracle-source-truth/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence