Misinformation expert Jeff Hancock was accused of citing fake sources in his written affidavit supporting a new anti-misinformation law in Minnesota, according to an independent news organization.
The state's attorney general asked Hancock, a Stanford University professor and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, to submit a supporting statement for a proposed law banning AI-generated content that influences elections, the Minnesota Reformer reported. The law is currently being challenged in federal court for allegedly violating the First Amendment.
Lawyers challenging the law are now accusing Hancock of using AI software to complete his written statement as it cited multiple studies that do not exist.
For example, Hancock cited "The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior" study, which he claimed was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. However, the study was not included on the cited pages and could not be found across the internet.
"The citation bears the hallmarks of being an artificial intelligence (AI) 'hallucination,' suggesting that at least the citation was generated by a large language model like ChatGPT," attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote, Minnesota Reformer reported. "Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock's declaration, but it calls the entire document into question."
"I declare under penalty of perjury that everything I have stated in this document is true and correct," Hancock added at the end of his statement, leaving both sides to wonder how much of his 12-page declaration was actually written by him.
Hancock has yet to comment on the allegations.
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