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?
We’re not. Its going to upend our already laughably busted “justice” system to new unknown heights of cartoonish malfeasance.
A bit dramatic imo. For most of legal history we didn’t actually have perfectly recorded video or audio, and while they are great tools at the present, they are still not the silver-bullet people would expect them to be at trial. (Think Trump and his cucks) Furthermore, most poor people try to avoid being recorded when doing crimes.
It will probably mean that focus will shift to other kinds of evidence and evidence-gathering methods. But definitely not the end of law as we know it, far from it.
Eventually, we will just have to accept that photographic proof is no longer proof.
There are ways that you could guarantee an image is valid. You would need a hardware security module inside the camera, which signs a hash of the picture with its own built-in security key that can’t be extracted and a serial number that it generates. That can prove that an image came from a particular camera, and if you change even one pixel of that image the signature won’t match anymore. I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Not mainstream at least. There are one or two camera manufacturers that offer this as a feature, but it’s not on things like surveillance cameras or cell phones nor will it be anytime soon.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?”
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.
