Yes, there’s DNA and other pieces of evidence. This is just a real dumb thought I had.
Eye witness is absolute dog shit…
It’s never been reliable. Like, unless it’s someone you know and recognize it’s worthless. Picking out of a lineup is about as fair as a carney game at the best of times if you saw a stranger commit a crime. But often the opps just have you keep talking until you vaugely reference the person they want and they call that a definitive ID.
That’s not even getting into how flawed our memories are and that the only way a human brain is like AI, is our brains hate not knowing an answer, but really doesn’t care if an answer is correct. We create and whole heatedly believe shit that never happened all the time.
Our brains just make shit up all the time, because not knowing makes us think, and thinking is hard.
So ask someone who robbed the bank, and I stead of “I don’t know” they’ll pick the person who looks like a bank robber and retroactively slide that face I to their memories and honestly believe they saw the suspect.
It’s the same as a lie detector, except not as well known.
But video corroborated by eyewitness testimony would be pretty good. Especially if they don’t know there is a video when giving their account.
Videos don’t tell the full story either, classic example was a video showing someone in a robbery with a gun, not shooting anyone. In reality they shot and killed someone out of frame but due to some specifics of the camera sensor and frame rate it didn’t capture them ever firing the gun
A good example is a photo from a while back of some celebrity shooting the middle finger.
But another picture from a different angle shows they were actually doing the ‘okay’ symbol.
I wish I could remember who it was
Our legal systems are not prepared for the fuckery that AI videos will do to court cases unless there’s a strict evidentiary chain of custody, or embedded metadata from an actual camera in the files.
*Tell me you’ve never encountered a real courtroom without telling me never encountered a real courtroom… *
Our legal systems have long required things like “chain of custody” and “corroborating evidence” for essentially any claim. Because in essentially any instance where the opposing sides dispute a question of fact they need to convince a mildly annoyed rando that things happened a certain way while the other team is arguing that it’s all a hoax.
They generally skip all that in courtroom dramas and even broadcasted courtrooms, because the very first phase of any trial is discovery where both sides show some or all of their cards to try and convince the other team to fold.
AI slop is hardly the first time someone invented a new tool for faking evidence. Heck, we had a whole industry based on faking video evidence before the first surveilance camera was ever installed.
(There’s a huge possibility for slander and fraud that the general public should wise up to, but starting with an assumption that evidence is fake unless proven otherwise is kinda how things go.)
(And, yes, the big hole here is that “best avaliable” evidence is often nonsense. ACAB and all that. My point is just that fake evidence isn’t a dangerous new invention courts have never seen before.)
You’re making me feel better about things!
Generally error diminishes if you get more independent observations.
