Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan says chatbots could become ‘truth oracles’

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. 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 ...