due diligence

NetChoice is a massive coalition of internet companies — look who’s in it — that is throwing enormous resources to block any law or proposed law in any and every state that requires age verification for access to websites. Given the technical challenges that make reliable age-verification schemes difficult if not impossible, I might have sympathy for the NetChoice companies if they weren’t who they are. (Oh the moral dilemma: thinking that laws are probably unconstitutional and yet wishing they succeed because you find the companies the laws target utterly loathsome.)

So in fighting a Louisiana law NetChoice recruited a supposed expert named Anthony Bean to affirm that social media use is not bad for young people in any way. As Volokh explains, the Louisiana Attorney General’s office took a look at this expert report and discovered that

None of the 17 articles in Dr. Bean’s reference list exists…. More, none of the 12 quotations that Dr. Bean’s report attributes to various authors and articles exists (even in the original sources provided to Defendants).

A cursory comparison between Dr. Bean’s report and the disclosed original sources would have alerted NetChoice that something is amiss. In fact, just reading Dr. Bean’s report would have done so. His reference list makes no sense, (a) citing website links that are dead or lead to entirely unrelated sources and (b) citing volume and page numbers in publications that are easily confirmed to be wrong. And his report itself is strangely formatted, not least because, well, it looks and reads like a print-out from artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Bean’s report bears all the telltale signs of AI hallucinations: completely fabricated sources and quotations that appear to be based on a survey of real authors and real sources.

(More like Mister Bean, amirite?) It’s kinda fun to look at the contents of their reply to Dr. Bean’s testimony:

Etc. There’s a joke going around that A.I. will create jobs because when a company turns a job over to chatbots it’ll then need to hire two people to find and correct the chatbots’ hallucinations.

Two predictions:

No matter how many organizations get burned by reliance on chatbots, new organizations will always buy in, thinking Well, we won’t get burned

No matter how many people get caught farming out their work to incompetent chatbots, new people will always buy in, thinking Well, I won’t get caught

Most human beings are, it seems, genetically predisposed to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch and that it’s just waiting for them to pick it up. The question is: How long will be take for people who are rooted in reality, and therefore perform due diligence, to outcompete the mindless herd?