First Year Seminar: Common Text

Each year, Saint Michael’s College chooses a common text to be read and discussed by the incoming class of new students. All first-year students are asked to read the book over the summer prior to arriving on campus. A panel discussion of the book is held during Orientation in late August, and each First-Year Seminar discusses the book at the start of the fall and spring semesters.

The Saint Michael’s College Common Text for the Class of 2029 is the forthcoming second edition (paperback) of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.

On June 12, 2025, incoming families received an email from Saint Michael’s College’s Dawn Ellinwood with the Common Text discount code and ordering information, including a link to the press page. Students also received an email on July 1st with ordering information, the discount code, and the link to order the book. You’ll probably also find the code in an early August letter from your First Year Seminar professor.

About the Book

How can we help to ensure that new technologies best serve the common good?

Stay smarter than your tools.

In 2019, Dr. Narayanan gave a talk called “How to Recognize AI Snake Oil.” It went viral and kicked off the writing of this book.

AI Snake Oil offers excellent critical context for understanding both benefits and failures associated with a variety of AI tools. Co-authors Narayanan and Kapoor are computer scientists who examine AI tools, especially (but not exclusively) generative and predictive AI. The co-authors bring a technical, practical point of view to their research regarding how well AI tools actually work – which is information that you can’t get in a reliable way from corporations seeking profit from individual AI tools.

They find mixed results. Narayanan and Kapoor identify scenarios in which AI tools are and will continue to be useful. Yet they also identify plenty of hype: products that fail to deliver on their sellers’ claims and/or have actively caused harm to a variety of different groups of people.

Narayanan and Kapoor acknowledge contemporary excitement, doubt, and fears about AI, as well as injustices to be rectified. They also show where and why humans can play essential roles in the future. AI Snake Oil contributes to a healthy overall process of gaining AI literacy.

How to Get the Book

The latest version of AI Snake Oil is available now to Saint Michael’s College community with our private code. This code gives you access to the book for our Common Text program, before it’s available to the general public.

Where is this code? On June 12, 2025, incoming families received an email from Saint Michael’s College’s Dawn Ellinwood with the Common Text discount code and ordering information, including a link to the press page. Students also received an email on July 1st with ordering information, the discount code, and the link to order the book. You’ll probably also find the code in an early August letter from your First Year Seminar professor.

Princeton University Press set up our private discount code so that Saint Michael’s students can buy the new second edition (2025) of this book in advance, at 30 percent off.

According to the publisher’s press release, the second edition includes “a new preface and epilogue penned by the authors. The preface offers reflection and concludes that the book’s argument remains current, while the epilogue looks to the future.” The first edition (2024) remains the heart of the book, and it is the version used for the audiobook, which some students may want to use alongside their print copy.

Your SMC discount code will be in effect through December 31, 2025.

Expect to Write and Talk About the Common Text Right Away

All first-year students should read the Common Text over the summer, regardless of whether they will take their required First-Year Seminar in the fall or spring semester.

Orientation includes a large panel discussion organized around the Common Text, and you’ll benefit much more from this event if you’ve read the book.

Once formal classes start, you will again use what you picked up from reading the book and attending the faculty panel. Each FYS section is organized by its own instructor, so assignments and discussions will differ. Regardless, you should expect to submit an essay about the Common Text within the first two weeks of the semester.

We are very pleased to host a guest lecture in September by Dr. Arvind Narayanan, named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. You can hear the latest from him and participate in a Q&A session. We encourage our students to speak up and help activate the conversation with one of the greats.

Reading Tips

Get ready for a book with plenty of everyday examples, to get our community thinking in new ways about the AI tools appearing around us.

Some sections of AI Snake Oil will be challenging to read on your own. Don’t worry! We select a challenging Common Text in order to learn how think our way through it, together. It is fine if some sections make more sense to you than others at the start. FYS includes various activities to shed light on our book and topic as we go.

Here are a few examples of tech that Narayanan and Kapoor will use to help illustrate their points. When you’re not sure about the vocabulary or idea they’re setting up, try looking at this kind of example:

• 39: Netflix recommendations, illustrating how rules are both developed and applied automatically
• 48-49:  Incorrect accusations of welfare fraud, illustrating “over-automation”
• 88: Videos that go viral for being awful, illustrating the unpredictability of success
• 124-125:  Two versions of the Mona Lisa, illustrating ramifications for people whose works are taken and reproduced without permission
• 140:  Chatbots outputting false information (otherwise known as …?)

The Faculty Panel and Essays

The 2025 Common Text panel will take place on Friday, Augutst 22, from 12:30-2:00pm, in the Recital Hall of McCarthy Arts Center.

Our faculty panelists bring very distinct professional profiles and experience with AI to our FYS discussion: Brad Demarest (Computer Science), Becca Gurney (Art & Design), and Crystal L’Hote (Philosophy).

This dialogue illustrates how liberal arts colleges help us to think and talk across professional boundaries, to better understand a phenomenon by looking into it from many sides.

September Visit to SMC by Dr. Arvind Narayanan

Dr. Arvind Narayanan

As noted above, Saint Michael’s is honored to announce that Dr. Narayanan will visit the College and deliver our First Year Seminar Common Text lecture on Thursday, September 11, at 7 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Kristin Dykstra
Director, First-Year Seminar Program
Distinguished Scholar in Residence
Saint Edmund’s Hall 345
802.654.2801
kdykstra@smcvt.edu