Elon Musk has been tentatively ordered to give a deposition in a lawsuit blaming Tesla’s Autopilot technology for a fatal car crash after the vehicle manufacturers’ lawyers suggested that Musk’s comments about the feature may have been the work of deepfakes. The family of Walter Huang are suing Tesla over the 2018 California crash that killed him, alleging that Huang’s Model X’s Autopilot malfunctioned and swerved the car into a concrete barrier. Lawyers for Huang’s family wanted to depose Musk over public comments made in 2016 in which Musk allegedly said: “A Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now.” Tesla, which maintains that Huang ignored his vehicle’s warnings and was playing a video game on his phone before the crash, opposed the deposition, saying Musk can’t recall making the comments and floated the idea that they may have been AI-generated. “[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,” Tesla said in court filings. After tentatively ordering the deposition, Judge Evette Pennypacker said Tesla’s arguments were “deeply troubling,” adding that such logic could allow Musk and other public figures “to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do.”