Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #607

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Stanford Expert On ‘Lying And Technology' Accused of Lying About Technology
By Stephen Council, Tech Reporter
In an bizarre twist, a Stanford University expert who studies mis- information appears to have created some of his own — while under oath.
On Nov. 1, Jeff Hancock, a well- known and oft- cited researcher who leads the Bay Area school’s Social Media Lab, filed an expert declaration in a Minnesota court case over the state’s new ban on political deep- fakes. Republicans
have sued to block the ban,
arguing it’s an unconstitutional limit on free speech. Hancock defended the law in his declaration, explaining
how artificial intel- ligence makes it easier to fabricate videos and dis- cussed deep- fakes’ psychologi- cal impacts. But he seems to have made an ironic mistake.
Hancock cited 15 references in his declaration, most- ly research papers related to political deep- fakes and their impacts. Two of the 15 sources do not appear to exist. The jour- nals he cites are real, as are some
of the two cita- tions’ authors, but journal
archives show no sign of either paper. The actual journal pages ref- erenced by Hancock have dif- ferent articles. SFGATE was unable to find the cited papers on Google Scholar, either.
The two missing papers are titled, according to Hancock, “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance” and “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political
Attitudes and Behavior.” The expert declara- tion’s bibliography includes links to these papers, but they currently lead to an error screen.
Hancock’s court filing ended with a signed declara- tion under penalty of perjury that everything stated in the document was “true and correct.”
It would be an unusual mistake for a professor whose promi- nence stems from years
of research and measured discus- sions of the field. His 2012 TED talk, called “The future of lying,” has about 1.5 mil- lion views. He was featured on Bill Gates’
new Netflix docu- mentary
series about AI. Hancock’s biogra- phy page on Stanford’s web- site promotes his experience dis- secting “lying and technology” and ongoing research into “the ethical issues associated with computation-
al social science.”
The Minnesota lit- igants pounced on Hancock’s apparent gaffe. Frank Bednarz, an attorney for Republican state Rep. Mary Franson and con- servative social media influencer Christopher Kohls, who are suing to block the deepfake ban, argued in a Nov. 16 filing that Hancock’s decla- ration should be excluded from the judge’s consider- ation of whether to give a prelimi- nary injunction against the law’s enforcement.
“The citation bears the hall- marks of being an artificial intelli- gence (AI) ‘hallu- cination,’ suggest- ing that at least the citation was generated by a large language model like ChatGPT,” Bednarz wrote. “Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock’s decla- ration, but it calls the entire docu- ment into ques-
tion, especially when much of the commentary con- tains no method- ology or analytic logic whatsoever.”
Hancock, who wrote in his expert declaration that he was paid $600 an hour for his expert testi- mony, did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s requests for com- ment on Friday. Nor did Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
John Stiles, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, told SFGATE his team “will respond in court shortly.”
Kohls, known as “Mr. Reagan” online, has
also sued Californ ia attorney gener- al Rob Bonta over new laws signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that limit the spread of AI- enabled political deepfakes.
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