Who produces AI hype? As we discuss in the AI Snake Oil book, it is not just companies and the media but also AI researchers. For example, a pair of widely-publicized papers in Nature in December 2023 claimed to have discovered over 2.2 million new materials using AI, and robotically synthesized 41 of them. Unfortunately, the claims were quickly debunked: “Most of the [41] materials produced were misidentified, and the rest were already known”. As for the large dataset, examining a sample of 250...