Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer scientist and co-author of “AI Snake Oil,” warned in a keynote at Northwestern University's McCormick Foundation Center computing-and-journalism symposium that growing trust in AI chatbots could turn them into “truth oracles,” pushing journalism toward a turning point it has not seen in 200 years. He said that once chatbots become the default entry point for checking facts, news organizations will lose one of their most basic functions — answering “what is true” — leaving them the parts machines handle poorly, such as contested issues, narrative, storytelling and clearly stated context; he described the shift as a “thin burger with thick bread,” with less execution and more judgment. Narayanan also argued that reporting, verification, analysis and distribution have been broken apart, so one- or two-person teams can now produce high-quality journalism, and called for journalists to take part in decisions about how AI platforms tune their algorithms, and even for taxes on AI and social media companies to counter the power imbalance with publishers.