PhD Researchers — AI-Generated Fake News Detection

At the University of Göttingen -Public Law Foundation-, Institut für Informatik, there are 2 positions as

PhD Researchers — AI-Generated Fake News Detection (all genders welcome)

Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L/100%

to be filled. Starting date is 1/1/2026. The position is limited to 21 months (until

The Chair of Scientific Information Analytics, headed by Prof. Dr. Bela Gipp (GippLab — ), conducts research at the intersection of computer science, data science, and information science. Natural language processing (NLP) based on Large Language Models (LLM) is a particular research focus of the chair.

As part of the research project " Defacto: Development of Falsely Manipulated Content Authenticity System" , we are looking for two full-time positions for PhD researchers (all genders welcome). The job posting is subject to the confirmation of project funding.

Project Description:

The rise of generative AI tools allows for the easy creation of highly realistic manipulated content, such as deepfake videos and synthetic text, posing a significant risk for misinformation and cybercrime. Current detection methods struggle to keep pace, often hampered by biased or insufficient training data. This project aims to address these challenges by developing a state-of-the-art, multimodal deepfake dataset focused on AI-generated manipulations. Your work will directly contribute to improving the robustness of detection systems, creating new benchmarks for the research community, and ultimately enhancing security against emerging digital threats.

Your Responsibilities

• Conduct cutting-edge research in generative AI to create a diverse dataset of manipulated content focusing on text but also including images, videos, and speech.
• Work with state-of-the-art generative models, including GANs, Diffusion Models (e.g., StyleGAN, FLUX), and LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Llama 3).
• Develop and maintain a data generation pipeline to ensure the dataset is continuously updated with emerging deepfake techniques.
• Design and implement human evaluation studies to assess the quality and realism of the generated content.
• Publish your findings at top-tier international conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS).
• Conduct teaching in accordance with the requirements of the PhD program in computer science at the University of Göttingen (low workload).
• Supervise bachelor's and master's students working on related projects.

Your Profile

• An excellent master's degree (or equivalent) in computer science, computational linguistics, mathematics, physics, data science, or a related discipline.
• Strong programming skills, particularly in Python.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and NLP libraries (e.g., Hugging Face).
• A solid foundation in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning; familiarity with LLMs and generative models is a significant plus.
• Self-motivation for independent scientific work, creativity, and a passion for solving complex challenges.
• International academic or industrial experience abroad through internships or scholarships in research institutions (e.g., CERN, ETH Zurich).
• Professional fluency (C1) in German and English, both written and spoken.

We Offer

• A stimulating, international, and collaborative research environment at one of Germany's top-tier universities.
• The chance to contribute to a high-impact project at the forefront of AI safety and media forensics.
• Close, supportive supervision to foster both your academic and personal development toward a PhD.
• Access to cutting-edge HPC resources, such as a GPU cluster with NVIDIA A100 GPUs, essential for large-scale model training.
• Funding to present your research at premier international conferences and engage with the global scientific community.
• A full-time position with a competitive salary under the German public service scale (TV-L), with the option of part-time employment.
• Office space and technical equipment. The position will be located in Göttingen on-site.

For more information, please contact Jan Philip Wahle by email: -

The University of Göttingen is an equal opportunities employer and places particular emphasis on fostering career opportunities for women. Qualified women are therefore strongly encouraged to apply in fields in which they are underrepresented. The university has committed itself to being a family-friendly institution and supports their employees in balancing work and family life. The University is particularly committed to the professional participation of severely disabled employees and therefore welcomes applications from severely disabled people. In the case of equal qualifications, applications from people with severe disabilities will be given preference. A disability or equality is to be included in the application in order to protect the interests of the applicant.

Please upload your application in one pdf file including the usual documents until 11/11/2025 on the application portal of the university using this link: . For more information get in touch with PD Dr. Terry Lima Ruas directly via E-Mail: -, Tel

Please note:

With submission of your application, you accept the processing of your applicant data in terms of data-protection law. Further information on the legal basis and data usage is provided in the Information General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)