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Research + Analysis

Teaching + Training

Hot Topic: Legal Research Considerations During an Election Year in the Age of AI and Deepfakes

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

8:30am – 9:30am CDT

Room: Grand Ballroom (East Tower Gold Level)

Moderator/Coordinator(s)

Kim Nayyer

Edward Cornell Law Librarian, Associate Dean for Library Services, and Professor of the Practice
Cornell Law School

Speaker(s)

Parminder S. Basran (he/him/his)

Associate Research Professor
Cornell University - College of Veterinary Medicine
Jake O. Effoduh (he/him/his)

Assistant Professor
Lincoln Alexander School of Law, Toronto Metropolitan University, Ontario, Canada
Nina E. Scholtz (she/her/hers)

Associate Librarian, Research and Instruction Librarian and Lead, Lawyering Research Skills and Adjunct Professor of Law
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, United States

Wordly Closed Captioning: https://attend.wordly.ai/join/KGDX-3499

In election years and times of democratic decision-making, the integrity, authority, and reliability of available or widely-shared information, including legal information, are paramount. At the same time, in the era of generative AI, digital information, and social platforms, these very aspects of legal information are at risk. Disinformation already abounds in this era. With widespread availability of generative AI and other digital information manipulation tools, the public is increasingly exposed to deepfakes and other forms of disinformation that risk the integrity of political, democratic, or other public participation processes. Three panelists will lead participants through an informed discussion of the technological foundations, the public participation and democratic issues, and the critical AI literacy skills implicated in this AI and digital informational and disinformational landscape. All information professionals—perhaps law librarians more than any—must be well-informed and ready to empower legal and other researchers to discern high-integrity information while identifying and rejecting deepfakes and disinformation.

Target Audience:

Law librarians, government librarians, social and political science educators, and others who teach about evaluating information and disinformation surrounding elections and other significant political and democratic processes. Anyone interested in improving their understanding of technical aspects of AI generation and evaluation of images generally, and deepfakes—images, video, audio, text, and disinformation broadly. Anyone interested in developing skills in evaluating deepfakes and AI, and improving AI literacy generally.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to comprehend and describe, at a level appropriate for a non-technically trained legal or public researcher, the technological aspects of AI generation or AI manipulation of images (including deepfakes). Examples may not be limited to images, video, and audio and may include other forms of AI-generated or manipulated disinformation.
Participants will learn about and be able to describe examples of outcomes related to or impacts of deepfakes in the context of elections in different jurisdictions globally. Contextual examples will illustrate impacts of deepfakes leading up to elections, during elections, and after elections.
Participants will develop skills to strengthen their ability to evaluate and differentiate AI-generated outputs or AI-manipulated information, including evaluation of images. These skills will include strategies to teach these skills to researchers and prepare them to critically evaluation deepfakes and other AI-driven disinformation they may encounter, in the context of elections.