The study was conducted by Stanford’s HAI institute, which receives heavy funding from Google (how much I couldn’t find because they don‘t publish their donations in a place I could find it; but I suspect it is alot). And the authors did not declare a non-conflict of interest at the end of the paper.
Wait, where are you seeing the link to HAI? TFA mentions something called "liftlab" which seems to be something under Stanford Law School and separate from HAI. The study has more than a dozen authors from as many different universities but HAI is not mentioned.
The leader of the study, Julian Nyarko, is Associate Director and Senior Fellow at HAI. I can't say whether that means the study was conducted by HAI, but there is at least a connection to it. https://hai.stanford.edu/people/julian-nyarko
You are right, this study was technically conducted by The Stanford Law AI Initiative which is co-chaired by Julian Nyarko who is also a senior fellow at HAI, and is also the lead author of this study.
This is enough of an association to claim a conflict of interest between the study authors and Google. But I wanted to go further and see if The Stanford Law AI Initiative had been given a research grant from HAI. So I spent way to long on both of their websites to find a list of research grants either awarded by HAI or received by Stanford Law AI Initiative. But no such luck. Despite HAI having a page dedicated to Centers and Labs, and to Research partners, and despite claiming 500+ research funded, they only list like 6 organizations each, and then link to each other in their “See More” button below.
I have a feeling I will have to browse through some tax filing papers to find the truth here. But I am not a journalist, so I am not gonna. I am simply gonna leave it at the obvious associations involved here. And maybe issue a correction: “conducted by a senior fellow at HAI”
Do papers need a "non-conflict of interest" disclosure nowadays to not be considered just ads?
When they are studying a consumer product it is pretty customary to declare a non-conflict of interest. So yes. Declare it at the end of your paper please.
Unless you have a conflict of interest, in which case declare e.g. “the lead author of this paper is an Associate Director and Senior Fellow at HAI which receives funding from Google the company which makes Gemini”.
The HAI is also funded with money from OpenAI, Antropic, and other big tech corporations. I don't know what you are trying to prove.