An anti-deepfake declaration may have been written by AI

Illustration: The Verge

A federal lawsuit over Minnesota’s “Use of Deep Fake Technology to Influence An Election” law is now directly dealing with the influence of AI. In a recent filing, attorneys challenging the law say an affidavit submitted to support it shows signs of containing AI-generated text. The Minnesota Reformer reports Attorney General Keith Ellison asked Stanford Social Media Lab founding director Jeff Hancock to make the submission, but the document filed includes non-existent sources that seem to have been hallucinated by ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM).

Hancock’s affidavit cites a 2023 study published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior.”…