Normally, when Brisson makes his grandiose claims, the reporters dutifully take notes and regurgitate them to the public. However, this week, Brisson gave a presentation to an audience of professionals – including academics and non-profit executives – and they asked follow up questions that Brisson was NOT prepared for. As usual, Brisson name dropped multiple academic institutions.

I was sent a video recording of the online meeting (to be posted shortly)

Brisson: We are also working on research projects. So we’ve worked with MIT, King’s College, Stanford, McGill, Yale, and other universities to understand what is the issue. So we have a lot of cases, so that can really help understand research. So we can analyze transcripts, one-on-one interviews, kind of see the demography of users, and trying to understand with research data..

After Brisson’s presentation, there was an Q&A. While the following question was not read aloud, context suggests it is a question about how their partnership with Stanford worked in terms of finances and ethics.

Brisson: Good question, Grant. Simple. The Stanford study didn’t go through us for the transcript. They just asked people directly in the community who would be willing to be part of the study. They compensated people directly. If you have questions about their IRB, I would go directly to to Stanford asking how they did pay people for that and how they collected transcripts. Yeah.

….An IRB is the institutional review board. So every time they do studies at university, they have to go through the institutional review board ethic committee to be able to properly do studies to properly protect data like like you seem to be concerned about.

(Uncomfortably long silence)

You can read the paper, it doesn’t say we’ve provided transcripts literally says like they contacted us and we’ve been in contact.

Yes, we can read the paper. And it directly contradicts Brisson.

We also received chat logs via the Human Line Project, a nonprofit organization set up as a community for people with lived experience (who have suffered emotional harm from AI). With individuals’ consent, this non-profit had identifiers removed from these logs before our research team reviewed them, and we did not receive any demographics.

Reported chain of custody clearly states the logs passed from user → Human Line Project → (de-identification step, by unknown personnel) → Stanford.

So why does Brisson vehemently deny being any part of it? Against Stanford’s own published report?

Does it have anything to do with why he became passive aggressive only a few minutes into this Q&A with industry professionals?

This is just one of MANY embarrassing mis-steps by Brisson in yesterday’s meeting.