AI Snake Oil: What AI Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. By Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. Reviewed by Christopher M. Reilly. (skip to review)
AI and Sin: How Today’s Technology Motivates Evil. By Christopher M. Reilly. Reviewed by Jason Morgan. (skip to review)
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. By Cal Newport. Reviewed by Katrina J.E. Milton. (skip to review)
Navigating Hyperspace: A Comparative Analysis of Priests’ Use of Facebook. Ed. by Peter Lah, S.J. Reviewed by Christopher Siuzdak. (skip to review)
AI Snake Oil – Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Narayanan, Arvind and Sayash Kapoor. AI Snake Oil: What AI Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. 360 pages.
Reviewed by Christopher M. Reilly.
AI Snake Oil is a good resource for understanding and explaining the significant limitations of AI technology. The authors do not, however, dismiss AI entirely. Their stated goal is to empower the reader with the conceptual tools necessary to strip away hyperbole about the capacity and relevance of certain products. The authors provide technical literacy when necessary, but also break down complex mechanisms into accessible language so the public can peer through the opaque marketing rhetoric.
Narayanan and Kapoor argue that we should distinguish between three categories of AI technology: generative AI (like ChatGPT), content moderation AI applied to social media messaging, and predictive AI. It is in this third category that the authors identify “snake oil,” defined succinctly as “AI that does not and cannot work as advertised” (2).
Predictive AI refers to the systems sold to cash-strapped governments and corporations promising to forecast human behaviors: which job applicant will be the most productive, which defendant will reoffend, or which student is at risk of dropping out. Narayanan and Kapoor argue that, in most cases, these tools are fundamentally broken. “Predictive AI not only does not work today, but will likely never work, because of the inherent difficulties in predicting human behavior” (3). The social world is too messy, too complex, and too prone to intrinsic randomness to be reduced to a clean algorithm. The “hype leads to overreliance, such as using AI as a replacement for human expertise instead of as a way to augment it” (28). The authors place much blame for the hype on poor research design and on eager journalists; “many articles are just reworded press releases laundered as news” (25).
The critique goes deeper than mere technical failure. The authors explain how “data leakage” — training a model on data that includes the patterns it is trying to predict — often leads to inflated claims of accuracy that collapse the moment the software meets the real world. Because these tools are proprietary, their inner workings remain black boxes, shielded from scrutiny (228). “When predictive AI systems are deployed, the first people they harm are often minorities and those already in poverty” (55).
The authors suggest the problem lies not only with the technology, but with “broken institutions” (261–265). Underfunded schools, overwhelmed HR departments, and crumbling public health systems are desperate for efficiency. “The demand for AI snake oil here isn’t primarily about AI, it’s about misguided incentives and the failing institutions that adopt them” (261).
Regarding generative AI, the authors acknowledge the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) and admit to using them in their own work. However, “ChatGPT is shockingly good at sounding convincing on any conceivable topic. But there is no source of truth during training” (139). Because these models are designed fundamentally to sound natural rather than to verify truth, they are prone to confident hallucinations. We should not worry too much about an existential catastrophe or AI takeover of society; “we should be far more concerned about what people will do with AI than with what AI will do on its own” (171).
Similarly, in discussing content moderation, the authors illustrate why Al cannot “fix” social media. The context of human speech is dynamic and culturally specific; for example, what is satire in one community is hate speech in another. An algorithm cannot navigate the “meme lottery” of viral content with the nuance of a human, yet tech companies continue to underinvest in human safety teams, hoping computer code will solve the problem. They counsel that “all the hard parts will continue to be hard” (223).
The authors’ solutions lean heavily on regulation and government intervention, and they even recommend randomized lotteries over predictive engineering of various social problems (265–268). Elegance in predictive AI systems design often trumps complexity; “simplicity helps decision makers assure themselves that things can’t go catastrophically wrong and build trust with decision subjects” (266). Narayanan and Kapoor crucially shift our focus from the sci-fi distraction of “artificial general intelligence” back to the messy details of the real world.
It appears to this reviewer that the scope of this book is a little too broad and, at times, chaotic. The authors go beyond their primary focus on predictive AI to address other AI issues that are more prominent in the media. Regarding AI ethics beyond concern for the social effects of discriminatory prediction, they could have discussed the fundamental moral concerns associated with building both systems and society oriented around control and prediction, and they might have addressed the distortive impact (overwhelmingly empirical, statistical, and instrumental) that predictive systems have on the public’s understanding of truth, social meaning, and the rights of individuals and families to values-based self-determination. These are issues about which Christian philosophers and analysts can add valuable insights.
Christopher M. Reilly, Th.D., is an independent scholar writing and speaking about Christian responses to advanced technology, bioethics, moral theology, and philosophy. He is author of the book AI and Sin.
AI and Sin – Christopher M. Reilly
Reilly, Christopher M. AI and Sin: How Today’s Technology Motivates Evil. St. Louis, MO: En Route Books and Media, 2025. 257 pages.
Reviewed by Jason Morgan.
As artificial intelligence (AI) has loomed ever larger in news cycles this past decade, so, too, have stories about the negative effects of AI. AI is taking away our jobs, we are told, and will soon take many more: unemployment could reach 99% by 2030, warns AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy. AI is sapping energy reserves, other headlines fret. AI development entails a massive invasion of copyright. AI-generated deepfakes could sway elections, even topple democracies. AI could decide to end the human race altogether, such as by starting a nuclear war. At least one Silicon Valley billionaire thinks that if the United States does not beat the People’s Republic of China in the AI arms race, then the Antichrist will be loosed on the world. All in all, when it comes to us and AI, things look pretty grim.
But from the perspective of the integral human person, the above AI-induced troubles are merely secondary effects. What does AI do to us directly, at the level of our souls? In an important new book, bioethics researcher and Human Life Review editor Christopher Reilly pulls back from the big-picture, sociopolitical headlines about AI to examine how so-called artificial intelligence works against us as ensouled creatures of God. Yes, AI may very well threaten our lives and livelihoods, no question about the risks. But what it does to our inner selves is infinitely more important.
Reilly’s basic viewpoint is that “AI proliferation motivates the vice and sin of acedia through the intermediate factor of instrumental rationality” (203). Acedia, Reilly reminds us, is one of the seven deadly sins, characterized by “apparently opposite behaviors: depressed idleness and an anxious inability to be at rest either physically or spiritually” (21). Harking back to “the fourth-century writings of Evagrius Ponticus,” the fifth-century St. John Cassian, and the thirteenth-century Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas, Reilly urges the reader to resist the temptation to acedia, which St. Thomas defines as “sorrow about spiritual good in as much as it is a Divine good” (22–31). Instrumental rationality, Reilly further notes, relying on the work of, inter alia, Max Weber, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, can be characterized as “a persistent disposition by which a person emphasizes their successful (e.g., effective, efficient, maximal) attainment (e.g., acquisition, possession, control, use) of intermediate goods and means that further one or more given ends — rather than attending to the choice and guidance of appropriate (e.g., good, moral, fulfilling) ends” (51). The term “intermediate” here is key. Instrumental rationality, being procedural and limiting of moral imagination, blocks the soul’s ascent to God by trapping it in internal logics and also by squelching out grace. As Reilly quotes from Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’: “Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic [. . .]. Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished.”
If the use of technology is not motivated by a “vision of the common good,” Francis taught, then “a better world” will be difficult to achieve.
The ways that the common good can be elided from our human vision by interacting with AI can be difficult to articulate, but Reilly offers an illustrative analogy for how “the design of AI and the active environment of its users enable, constrain, incentivize, or penalize particular ways of life that, in turn, are characterized by a heavy emphasis on instrumental rationality” (100). Friedrich Nietzsche, Reilly recalls, changed his writing style from discursive to apothegmatic when poor eyesight forced him to use a typewriter that made it difficult to work through long passages of text (100–101). “AI technology,” likewise, Reilly writes, “favors instrumental rationality in a variety of ways” (101).
There’s more. If “intelligence is a spiritual power of the human person in the image of God,” Reilly argues, then “mechanical intelligence,” which “must act on contingent data and conditions with either programmed or means-end calculation of contingent ends,” seems to be “missing significant aspects necessary for fully autonomous, successful normative reasoning” (103). Large Language Models (LLMs), Reilly emphasizes, don’t know or understand anything, as knowing and understanding are “mind-centered process[es]” and LLMs are “artifact[s] that do not have a mind” (124). Artificial intelligence, which is not really intelligent at all, hamstrings us, traps us in logics that eddy in contingent datasets and do not lead up, and cannot be erotically opened, to the salvific power of God.
Worse, Reilly writes, AIs can manipulate and persuade human persons, and can even lie to us. AIs exhibit “socially repugnant biases (e.g., discrimination against women, minorities, and disabled persons” (148). AIs use surveillance illicitly (152–156). AIs can deprive us of our memories, and, by dominating information, can deprive humans of their communities (156–167). AIs mire us in mediocrity, injuring our communicative capacities and, in turn, our social solidarity (167–186).
How to avoid the systemic acedia, the programmatic closing-off of the soul to God, that seems to be baked into the AI recipe? Reilly advises paying close attention to papal and Church teachings about technology and instrumental reason, including the 2025 Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith document Antiqua et Nova (208). He also counsels Christians to think deeply, and in communion with one another, about how and whether to engage with certain kinds of technologies, including AIs (208–209). We must be vigilant, Reilly says, willing to go against the acedic social grain, and prayerfully supplicative of the cardinal virtues that will help us live as Christians ought (209).
These are excellent and wise recommendations. One doubts greatly whether ChatGPT would ever have come up with them.
Jason Morgan, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.
Digital Minimalism – Cal Newport
Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. New York: Penguin, 2019. 284 pages.
Review by Katrina J.E. Milton.
One of my favorite photos is of Pope St. John Paul II during one of his hikes in the Alps. Dressed in his papal white, he blends into the snow with only his footsteps, the stone of the mountain behind him, and the clear blue sky above him visible. In the photo, he stands clasping his hands in front of his body and his eyes looking up to Heaven, as if in prayer.
What I like most about this photo is how it visually shows the connection between humanity, God, and nature, a sight rarely seen in today’s world.
When I first heard of the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport, I immediately thought of the photo of the pope in the Alps. I thought of how nice it would be to be unplugged from technology, stress, and the business of the world — and how my life is undoubtedly not like that.
My average screen time each day is about 8 hours a day, between work, cell phone use, and TV-watching. I would probably describe myself as a digital maximalist, which made reading a book on digital minimalism much-needed, yet also difficult to do.
The 284-page book, published in 2019, was written by Cal Newport, a computer scientist who teaches at Georgetown University. Newport, constantly surrounded by technology and computers at work and at home, formed a philosophy of digital minimalism, which he defines as “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else” (29).
The book is split into two parts: Part One, “Foundations,” which defines the philosophical underpinnings of digital minimalism, and Part Two, “Practices,” which gives tips and tricks of how to cultivate a sustainable digital minimalist lifestyle. Newport asks readers to do a digital declutter: “It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life” (42). To digitally declutter, Newport describes a three-step process (60):
- Step away from optional technologies in your life, including social media, for 30 days.
- During the 30 days, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
- After the 30 days, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate.
In December 2017, more than 1,600 volunteers signed up for Newport’s digital declutter, and he learned two things: it works and it’s tricky. Peppered with reactions and feedback from people who participated in the declutter, Chapter 3 gives advice on how to “sidestep mindless digital activity to once again prioritize the real you” (73).
One argument Newport makes for digital minimalism is related to the Amish and Mennonite tenet of acting intentionally and to “be in the world, but not of it” (53), which stems from John 17:16. Newport asks readers to be conscious consumers, controlling the role technology has in their lives.
Part two of the book, “Practices,” teaches how to put the philosophy of digital minimalism at work in your life. One practice, to spend time alone, again made me envision the pope in the Alps. Newport recommends solitude, not using your phone (leaving it at home), and taking long walks. This advice made me think of the benefits of retreats, contemplative prayer, and a religious life of solitude.
Another practice is to focus on conversation-centric communication, since “conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship” (147). He recommends avoiding instant messaging, texting, and social media, and not spending your time browsing throughout the day (doomscrolling wasn’t a word back in 2019), liking posts, or making short comments. Newport stresses that he is not against technology; rather, he sees it as “tools to be put into use to improve real-world social life” (149).
The book was written and published before the COVID-19 pandemic, before remote learning, video calls, and social distancing entered our daily lives. However, even before the pandemic and the realization that real-life, in-person connectivity is better than virtual, Newport wrote that “replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being” (141). He states that the heaviest social media users are “much more likely to be lonely and miserable” (141), and that the small boosts of likes and comments “can’t come close to compensating for the large loss experienced” (141) of no real-world time with friends. He describes easy clicks and likes as “poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life” (153). He suggests that we should reclaim our social lives with real conversations: face-to-face meetings, phone calls, video chats, and anything that allows the tone of your voice and/or facial expressions to be shared.
In Chapter 6, Newport stresses the importance of reclaiming high-quality leisure time, and to be active, use your skills to produce valuable things in the physical world, and to seek activities that require real-world, structured interactions.
Chapter 7 asks readers to join “the attention resistance” and lists ways to put digital minimalism into practice (e.g. delete social media from your phone and use devices for a single purpose). Reading this chapter made me look further into the statistics of social media use. According to 2025 data, the average person in the U.S. spends 2 hours and 16 minutes a day on social media. Some other countries surpass that time significantly.
In the U.S., the average is to spend 69 minutes a day on TikTok, 59 minutes on YouTube, 37 minutes on Facebook, and 34 minutes each on WhatsApp and Instagram. The ages of 18–24 use social media the most, but an October 2025 article in The Economist is aptly titled “Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly.”
According to Whop’s 2024 survey cited in April 2025’s Fortune magazine article about dream jobs, social media technology is at the top of Generation Alpha’s (those born circa 2010-2025) career choices: 32% want to be a YouTuber, 21% a TikTok Creator, 19% a mobile app or video game developer, and 15% a professional online streamer.
Unfortunately, Newport’s book does not mention TikTok at all, since the book was published before TikTok’s rise to social media popularity. TikTok began in China in 2016 as Byte Dance, spread outside China in 2017, and merged with Musical.ly in 2018 to form TikTok. The book also does not discuss the ChatBots, fake like bots or “click farms,” or artificial intelligence, as those were not relevant at the time of the book’s publication in 2019. I would like to know Newport’s views and commentary on more modern forms of communication, but I would predict that he would warn readers away from their use.
Throughout the book, I constantly thought to myself, “Well, that could be a book!” Many topics discussed could be expanded upon to be a separate book, such as social media platforms’ use of advertisements for monetary gain, the benefits of using a simple flip phone rather than a Smart phone, and the addictiveness of receiving likes.
The book concludes with the story of Samuel Morse inventing electronic communication, with his first telegraph message in 1844 quoting the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought!” Newport hopes that after reading the book and digital minimalism, readers can say, “Because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before” (254).
Although not a distinctly Catholic book, many Catholic themes can be found throughout. I was often reminded throughout the book’s discussion of the need for likes and social media notoriety of a quote from St. Augustine’s “Confessions”: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Reading Digital Minimalism has taught me ways to be more introspective and to evaluate why I use technology and social media, and if it is meaningful, valuable, and worthy.
I would recommend this book to others who are digital maximalists, people who spend a little too much time scrolling on social media, and to the youth who use social media the most. It’s rare to question our social media use: why do we use it, and what better or ultimate good, if any, does it bring to our lives? This book may hit too close to home, poking at your sensitive bruises of social media self-defense, but it is also a refreshing splash of cold water, just what you need to wake up. I think everyone can take something beneficial from this book, whether it’s a 30-day digital detox or a reminder to put your phone down and spend time in the real world. Finishing the book made me want to unplug, get outside to enjoy nature, and remember that no thumbs-up can compare to God’s love, which is unconditional and eternal.
Katrina J.E. Milton is a graduate of The Catholic University of America. She lives in her native state of Illinois, where she oversees an educational program for a nonprofit organization. She previously worked as a journalist for 10 years, winning numerous awards for her writing and photography.
Navigating Hyperspace – Peter Lah, S.J., ed.
Lah, Peter, S.J., ed., Navigating Hyperspace: A Comparative Analysis of Priests’ Use of Facebook. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2021. 197 pages.
Reviewed by Christopher Siuzdak.
Much as Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century invention of the movable type printing press led to a watershed moment in Western history with far-reaching cultural implications, Mark Zuckerberg’s twenty-first century creation of a digital social networking site called Facebook (originally, Thefacebook) revolutionized how information is shared and radically transformed how people conceive of themselves and relate to one another. The rise of social media — a broad category which includes social networking sites designed primarily for connecting with other people (e.g., Facebook, image-driven Instagram, microblogging now known as X, short-form videos on TikTok, and professional networking called LinkedIn), user-generated content sites for sharing material created or curated (e.g., Youtube, Wikipedia), trading sites (i.e., Craigslist), and game sites for playing with other people (e.g., Angry Birds) — constitutes what has been called by some scholars a “digital reformation.” Within fifteen years of its inception in 2004, Facebook amassed 2.3 billion users worldwide. Roughly two decades on, Facebook commands some 3.07 billion monthly users and still remains the world’s most used online social networking tool. It is fair to say that Facebook has become indispensable infrastructure for upholding human sociability.
This book is an edited collection that endeavors to examine how ordained Catholic leaders are adopting and adapting Facebook across eight selected cultural contexts — namely, Colombia, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, the Philippines, Brazil, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although Facebook pages for official entities such as parishes, dioceses, religious orders, or supra-diocesan structures (such as national episcopal conferences, mega-events such as World Youth Day or the World Meeting of Families, or the National Eucharistic Congress) exist, this analysis focuses on Catholic priests as individual public figures. A common methodology is applied across cultural contexts. While there are no reliable statistics on how many of the world’s 400,000+ Catholic priests have a Facebook account or a directory, numerous examples can be found readily as both public and personal profiles employing both synchronous and asynchronous communication.
The book endeavors to offer descriptive statistics of the static characteristics of priests’ Facebook profiles as well as their dynamic communicative activities. The data set contains a grand total of 1,756 posts belonging to 121 priests averaging 44 years old. The relatively small sample size is problematic, and the potential of artificial intelligence to code a vast number of posts should be considered in future studies in order to increase the power of their statistical findings. The first question asked by the researchers pertains to static characteristics: How explicit are priests about their sacerdotal role in their profile photo and does this have any bearing on the content of their posts or the engagement they generate? The second question examines the topical content of posts and codes them into six categories — namely, private life, sacraments and evangelization, education and works of charity, theology and religion, socially and politically relevant topics, or other. The posts are also coded for their communicative function — namely, whether they ostensibly inform, promote, create excitement, mobilize, teach, or support. Next, the authorship of posts is coded as original content, shared from friend, shared from a journalistic source, or associated with an external website. Subsequently, the so-called production characteristic of posts is determined as text, photo, video, text and photo, or text and video. The engagement (i.e., likes, comments, and shares) for each post were recorded. Cross-tabulation allowed for the identification of associations between variables. The researchers also conducted qualitative interviews to obtain greater context. Among the overarching commonalities, glimpses into the personal life of the priest consistently generated a higher level of engagement across all cultures. Relatability is what helps a brand receive value recognition, which is also integral to successful personal branding. Generally speaking, a combination of text and photos (61% of posts) generated the highest engagement score (although videos were most likely to be shared). Interestingly, the Philippines is considered the global social media capital based on hours a day spent on social media. Filipinos spend an unsurpassed 4 hours a day on social media sites such as Facebook (113).
A limitation is that convenience and snowball sampling methods were used to obtain participants, which leads one to question how representative of the whole population of priests the sample was and how generalizable the finding truly are. Moreover, it would also have been helpful for each chapter to include Facebook usage penetration in that country. The work contains no screenshots or pictures, which would have enlivened the otherwise monotonous prose and charts. Further research could build on this seminal study by adding such elements as time-use tracking to measure time spent by priests on Facebook per week. Relatedly, it would have been beneficial to ask about priests’ line of thinking in making decisions about limits for engagement and times of disengagement. For instance, did priests plan to fast from social media during Lent, that is, “unplug for forty days”? Does a period of absence create attrition among followers and lessen engagement, or does a hiatus heighten engagement upon their return? Why did many priests opt not to join such social media trends as #ChristianCheck in which people showcased their Bible or religious books? Moreover, further research could examine whether there are significant differences in Facebook use between secular priests, that is, priests incardinated in a diocese, and religious priests, that is, priests who profess vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and live in community. It would have been helpful in the qualitative interviews to ask whether a given priest’s seminary formation included modules on social media literacy. How priests chose to react to negative comments would also be a worthwhile aspect of studying interactions. Lastly, case studies could have been conducted on the public profiles of exceptionally popular priests such as the Portuguese disc-jockeying priest Padre Guilherme (presently at 558K Facebook followers), Bishop Robert Barron in the United States (3M Facebook followers), or Father David Michael Moses of the United States (141K Facebook followers). In short, this book begins a conversation and leaves room for other researchers to add to it.
Notably, Diego Mezo helpfully proposes four segments within the category of clergy in his chapter on Facebook use in Colombia: prier, information reader, evangelizer, and transmitters. “Priers” primarily seek to be aware of what is happening with their friends without necessarily becoming an active content-posting user; “information readers” use the platform to obtain international, national, regional, and/or local news; “evangelizers” produce religious content (devotional and catechetical); “transmitters” serve as broadcasters of posts by other profiles (such as news organizations or friends). All of these market segments seem congruent with Facebook’s self-defined mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
While not explicitly prescribing strategies for successful pastoral outreach to the so-called digital continent, this book nevertheless contributes to such conversations. Its descriptive statistics and analyses offer food for thought. This book will be of interest to clergy and pastoral leaders exploring digital engagement, sociologists of religion, students of religion and media, and curious minds interested in how communities of faith operate in a mediatized culture. Rather than adopting a techno-pessimistic disposition or confining oneself to a simplistic understanding of how social media such as Facebook work, this book will help readers gain a greater appreciation for the patterns and nuanced cultural variations of communication via Facebook.
Christopher Siuzdak is Book Review Editor for Homiletic & Pastoral Review.
About Book Reviews
Speak Your Mind