Misinformation Expert’s “Citation to Fake, AI-Generated Sources in His Declaration … Shatters His Credibility with This Court”
From today’s order by Laura Provinzino (D. Minn.) in Kohls v. Ellison (see this Nov. 19 post for more):
Minnesota law prohibits, under certain circumstances, the dissemination of “deepfakes” with the intent to injure a political candidate or influence the result of an election. Plaintiffs challenge the statute on First Amendment grounds and seek preliminary injunctive relief prohibiting its enforcement.
With his responsive memorandum in opposition to Plaintiffs’ preliminary-injunction motion, Attorney General Ellison submitted two expert declarations … [including one] from Jeff Hancock, Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. The declarations generally offer background about artificial intelligence (“AI”), deepfakes, and the dangers of deepfakes to free speech and democracy….
Attorney General Ellison concedes that Professor Hancock included citations to two non-existent academic articles and incorrectly cited the authors of a third article. Professor Hancock admits that he used GPT-4o to assist him in drafting his declaration but, in reviewing the declaration, failed to discern that GPT-4o generated fake citations to academic articles.
The irony. Professor Hancock, a credentialed expert on the dangers of AI and misinformation, has fallen victim to the siren call of relying too heavily on AI—in a case that revolves around the dangers of AI, no less. Professor Hancock offers a detailed explanation of his drafting process to explain precisely how and why these AI-hallucinated citations in his declaration came to be. And he assures the Court that he stands by the substantive propositions in his declaration, even those that are supported by fake citations. But, at the end of the day, even if the errors were an innocent mistake, and even if the propositions are substantively accurate, the fact remains that Professor Hancock submitted a declaration made under penalty of perjury with fake citations.
It is particularly troubling to the Court that Professor Hancock typically validates c
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