MIT's Deb Roy: LLMs are erasing accountability from public discourse
MIT News AI · rss · 2026-10-13
MIT professor Deb Roy argues in a new Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists essay that AI-generated text is undermining civic accountability. He cites the FCC's 2017 net neutrality comment period, where 18 million of 22 million comments were fake — fraud detectable by templated fingerprints that LLMs now erase. He calls for pairing speech with "standing" (a stake behind the words) and "answerability" (obligation to answer for them), noting privacy and accountability aren't opposites since institutions can verify speakers without exposing them. His MIT center uses AI to surface themes in group deliberations while keeping humans responsible at every step.
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