Misinformation scholar becomes a star example of the problem
At The College Fix, Morgan Kromer reports that misinformation expert Jeff Hancock, a professor at Stanford University, has apologized for using fake citations, inserted by an AI program into a legal brief. Ironically, the brief concerned a Minnesota law against deepfakes:
Hancock, the editor of a journal about “misinformation,” played his own role in spreading fake news, when he submitted testimony that included “hallucinated citations,” meaning they were not real. In his initial filing, he declared himself an “expert” on “technology.”
But Hancock (pictured) later had to amend his filing to “acknowledge three citation errors,” after opposing counsel flagged the mistakes. He made the mistake because he left in blank citations which his program filled in by creating them out of thin air.
“Experts weigh in on ‘misinformation’ scholar who used fake AI citations,” February 19, 2025
Ah yes, the frequent problem of hallucination:
A University of Kansas law professor said AI models can remain stubborn and insist their citations are real.
“When you press [large language models] on it, sometimes they will double down and they will justify that this thing indeed is true,” Associate Dean of Graduate and International Law Andrew Torrance told The Fix on a phone interview.
“So, you have to do rigorous fact checking. You really should check every sentence that an AI generates,” Professor Torrance told The Fix.
Maybe it would be smarter and safer to do those citations oneself. Torrance and colleagues offer an open-access 2023 paper on safe, efficient, minimalist uses of AI in serious intellectual work.
It can be no secret that many of us are skeptical of the very premise of many efforts against “misinformation”: that there is a class of people who are somehow immune to receiving and spreading incorrect information and that therefore they should be in charge of policing it.
In fact, with information as with many things, sunlight is a far better disinfectant.,
You may also wish to read: So who are today’s disinformation police? Social scientists are striving to develop ways to blunt the force of information that governments would rather the public did not know or heed. The disinformation experts claim to be defending democracy — and yet their principal weapon is indoctrination.
