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Stanford Professor Accused of Using AI to Write Expert Testimony Criticizing Deepfakes
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Minnesota's law criminalizing election deepfakes say an expert brought in by the state likely wrote his opinion with the help of AI.
Jeff Hancock, the founding director of Stanford’s Social Media Lab, submitted his expert opinion earlier this month in Kohls v. Ellison, a lawsuit filed by a YouTuber and Minnesota state representative who claim the state’s new law criminalizing the use of deepfakes to influence elections violates their First Amendment right to free speech. His opinion included a reference to a study that purportedly found “even when individuals are informed about the existence of deepfakes, they may still struggle to distinguish between real and manipulated content.” But according to the plaintiff’s attorneys, the study Hancock cited—titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior” and published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics—does not actually exist. “Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock’s declaration, but it calls the entire document into question, especially when much of the commentary contains no methodology or analytic logic whatsoever.”
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