Judge knocks back Elon Musk's ridiculous claim in fatal Tesla crash lawsuit: His statements about auto-driving safety could have been deepfaked

pcgamer.com:

A judge in California has ordered that Elon Musk be interviewed under oath about claims he made for the safety and capabilities of Tesla vehicles in 2016. This is all part of a larger lawsuit being brought against Tesla by the family of Walter Huang, who was in a Tesla with partially automated driving software in 2018 when he was killed in a car crash.

The suit brought by Huang's family alleges that Tesla's software failed; for its part, Tesla claims Huang was playing a game on his phone and disregarded vehicle warnings before the crash. Solicitors for the Huang family sought to depose Musk about his 2016 claim that the Tesla Model S and X cars «can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person—right now» (thanks, Reuters(opens in new tab)).

Musk can be seen saying those words in the below video.

Then came a pretty unbelievable twist that, sadly, may well become a common feature in high profile trials. Tesla's solicitors opposed Musk being deposed, arguing both that he couldn't remember details of the statement, and that the recording may not be authentic:

"[Musk], like many public figures, is the subject of many 'deepfake' videos and audio recordings that purport to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did."

That is a pretty striking claim, especially about a video posted six years ago from the official Recode conference account (this is where the remarks were made) and with just under four million views over that timespan. We've obviously seen various examples of deepfakes in recent times, but the source material here seems as legit as it gets and frankly I doubt the technology was there in 2016 to produce something like this.

The amazingly named Judge Evette Pennypacker, thankfully, didn't