If AI and deep fakes can listen to a video or audio of a person and then are able to successfully reproduce such person, what does this entail for trials?
It used to be that recording audio or video would give strong information which often would weigh more than witnesses, but soon enough perfect forgery could enter the courtroom just as it’s doing in social media (where you’re not sworn to tell the truth, though the consequences are real)
I know fake information is a problem everywhere, but I started wondering what will happen when it creeps in testimonies.
How will we defend ourselves, while still using real videos or audios as proof? Or are we just doomed?
Fake evidence, e.g. forged documents, are not not new things. They take things like origin, chain of custody etc into account.
Sure, but if you meet up with someone and they later have an audio recording that is completely fabricated from the real audio, there’s nothing for chain of anything. Audio used to be damning evidence and was fairly easily discoverable if it was hacked together to try to sound different. If that goes away, then it just becomes useless as evidence.
It becomes useless as evidence unless you can establish authenticity. It just makes audio recordings more in a class with text documents; perfectly fakeable, but admissible with the right supporting information. So I agree it’s a change, but it’s not the end of audio evidence, and it’s a change in a direction which courts already have experience.
You can’t just use an audio file by itself. It has to come from somewhere.
The courts already have a system in place that if someone seeks to introduce a screenshot of a text message, or a printout of a webpage, or a VHS tape with video, or just a plain audio file, needs to be able to introduce that as evidence, with someone who testifies that it is real and that it is accurate, with an opportunity for others to question and even investigate where it came from and how it was made/stored/copied.
If I just show up to a car accident case with an audio recording that I claim is the other driver admitting that he forgot to look before turning, that audio is gonna do basically nothing unless and until I show that I had a reason to be making that recording while talking to him, why I didn’t give it to the police who wrote the accident report that day, etc. And even then, the other driver can say “that’s not me and I don’t know what you think that recording is” and we’re still back to a credibility problem.
We didn’t need AI to do impressions of people. This has always been a problem, or a non-problem, in evidence.
As someone who works in the field of criminal law (in Europe, and I would be shocked if it wasn’t the same in the US) - I’m not actually very worried about this. By that I don’t mean to say it’s not a problem, though.
The risk of evidence being tampered with or outright falsified is something that already exists, and we know how to deal with it. What AI will do is lower the barrier for technical knowledge needed to do it, making the practice more common.
While it’s pretty easy for most AI images to be spotted by anyone with some familiarity with them, they’re only going to get better and I don’t imagine it will take very long before they’re so good the average person can’t tell.
In my opinion this will be dealt with via two mechanisms:
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Automated analysis of all digital evidence for signatures of AI as a standard practice. Whoever can be the first person to land contracts with police departments to provide bespoke software for quick forensic AI detection is going to make a lot of money.
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A growth in demand for digital forensics experts who can provide evidence on whether something is AI generated. I wouldn’t expect them to be consulted on all cases with digital evidence, but for it to become standard practice where the defence raises a challenge about a specific piece of evidence during trial.
Other than that, I don’t think the current state of affairs when it comes to doctored evidence will particularly change. As I say, it’s not a new phenomenon, so countries already have the legal and procedural framework in place to deal with it. It just needs to be adjusted where needed to accommodate AI.
What concerns me much more than the issue you raise is the emergence of activities which are uniquely AI dependent and need legislating for. For example, how does AI generated porn of real people fit into existing legislation on sex offences? Should it be an offence? Should it be treated differently to drawing porn of someone by hand? Would this include manually created digital images without the use of AI? If it’s not decided to be illegal generally, what about when it depicts a child? Is it the generation of the image that should be regulated, or the distribution? That’s just one example. What about AI enabled fraud? That’s a whole can of worms in itself, legally speaking. These are questions that in my opinion are beyond the remit of the courts and will require direction from central governments and fresh, tailor made legislation to deal with.
I think other answers here are more essential - chain of custody, corroborating evidence, etc.
That said, Leica has released a camera that digitally signs its images, and other manufacturers are working on similar things. That will allow people to verify whether the image is original or has been edited. From what I understand Leica has some scheme where you can sign images when you update them too, so there’s a whole chain of documentation. Here’s a brief article
It’s an interesting experiment, but why would we trust everything that Leica supposedly verified? The same shit with digital signatures and blockchain stuff. We are at the gates of the world where we have zero trust by default and would only intentionally outsource verification to third parties we trust, because penalties for mistakes are growing each day.
I don’t think we should inherently. I’ve thought about the idea of digitally signed photos and it seems sound unless someone is quite clever with electronics. I’m guessing there’s some embedded key on the camera that is hard but maybe not impossible to access. If people can hack Teslas for “full autopilot” or run Doom on an ATM machine I’m not confident that this kind of encryption will never be cracked. However, I would hope an expert witness would also examine the camera that supposedly took the picture. I would think it to be impossible for someone to acquire the key without a 3rd party detecting the intrusion.
Today we have EXIFs and it’s better to wipe them all of these for privacy reasons. Because every picture you take otherwise contains a lot of your data like geoloc, model, exposuer, etc. That’s the angle they are yet to tackle - because most of these things are also leave us vulnerable.
They make Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) that are very difficult to crack, to the point that it is unbreakable at our current technology level. With a strong HSM, a high-bit per-device certificate signed by the company’s private key gives you authenticity and validation until the root key or HSM are broken, which is probably good enough for today while we try to figure out something better IMO.
Well as I said, I think there’s a collection of things we already use for judging what’s true, this would just be one more tool.
A cryptographic signature (in the original sense, not just the Bitcoin sense) means that only someone who possesses a certain digital key is able to sign something. In the case of a digitally signed photo, it verifies “hey I, key holder, am signing this file”. And if the file is edited, the signed document won’t match the tampered version.
Is it possible someone could hack and steal such a key? Yes. We see this with certificates for websites, where some bad actor is able to impersonate a trusted website. (And of course when NFT holders get their apes stolen)
But if something like that happened it’s a cause for investigation, and it leaves a trail which authorities could look into. Not perfect, but right now there’s not even a starting point for “did this image come from somewhere real?”
A camera that authenticates the timestamp and contents of an image is great. But it’s still limited. If I take that camera, mount it on a tripod, and take a perfect photograph of a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the resulting image will be yet another one of millions of similar copies, only with a digital signature proving that it was a newly created image today, in 2024.
Authenticating what the camera sensor sees is only part of the problem, when the camera can be shown fake stuff, too. Special effects have been around for decades, and practical effects are even older.
You’re right, cameras can be tricked. As Descartes pointed out there’s very little we can truly be sure of, besides that we ourselves exist. And I think deepfakes are going to be a pretty challenging development in being confident about lots of things.
I could imagine something like photographers with a news agency using cameras that generate cryptographically signed photos, to ward off claims that newsworthy events are fake. It would place a higher burden on naysayers, and it would also become a story in itself if it could be shown that a signed photo had been faked. It would become a cause for further investigation, it would threaten a news agency’s reputation.
Going further I think one way we might trust people we aren’t personally standing in front of would be a cryptographic circle of trust. I “sign” that I know and trust my close circle of friends and they all do the same. When someone posts something online, I could see “oh, this person is a second degree connection, that seems fairly likely to be true” vs “this is a really crazy story if true, but I have no second or third or fourth degree connections with them, needs further investigation.”
I’m not saying any of this will happen, just it’s potentially a way to deal with uncertainty from AI content.
Hardware signing stuff is not a real solution. It’s security through obscurity.
If someone has access to the hardware, they technically have access to the private key that the hardware uses to sign things.
A determined malicious actor could take that key and sign whatever they want to.
When video or audio evidence is submitted, it will be questioned as to its authenticity. Who recorded it? On what device? Then we’ll look for other corroborating evidence. Are there other videos that captured the events in the background of the evidence video? Are there witnesses? Is there contradictory evidence?
Say there’s a video depicting a person committing murder in an alley. The defense will look for video from the adjoining streets that show the presence or absence of the murderer before or after. If those videos show cars driving by with headlights on, they will look for corresponding changes in the luminosity of the crime video. If the crime happened in the daytime, they will check that the shadows correspond to Sun’s position at that moment. They’ll see if the reflections of objects match the scene. They’ll look for evidence that the murderer was not at the scene. Perhaps a neighbor’s surveillance camera shows they were at home or their cell phone indicated they were someplace else.
But if all these things indicate the suspect was in the alley and the video is legitimate, that’s powerful evidence toward a conviction.
Are there other videos that captured the events in the background of the evidence video?
I think this is key in a trial setting. A published picture might be unique but to think the photographer snapped just one picture while nobody else was present or also photographing is a bit of a stretch.
Science has proven that the entire model of human memory as factual testimony is a fallacy. That came out long before AI in the public space. I don’t think anyone has addressed that revelation. I doubt anyone will address this one. Hell, there are still people sketching the courtroom like cameras don’t exist. A president can stage a failed coup and a SC judge can fly the traitor’s flag and there are no consequences for either.
So what will be done, absolutely nothing, unless some billionaires stage a proxy war over it.
