Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases

It's because they're a scam. Point the camera at a forged image with a higher resolution than the camera sensor and it will make a signed copy of the unsigned forgery.

That's before getting into the practical problems with securing the keys. Every camera by every manufacturer has keys in it and the attacker only needs one key from one camera, and they get to choose the model? Creating something premised on needing to trust something with such a high probability of being compromised is worse than nothing, because it allows the ensuing forgeries a mechanism to pass themselves off as "signed" "real" images.

The general population does not understand technology sufficiently well to set it up correctly, regulate it or use it correctly. Until we educate our population more on technology we will always be in this state.

it's a feature, not a bug

Probably simply a case of "show me a picture of X with their fingers in the cookie jar".

My experiece with whatsapp family groups is that a lot of people over 40 can't detect the most obvious AI fakes (e.g. Studio Gibli clones, or three handed people), so they share the most stupid stuff as it was real, while youngers seem have an instinct to detect AI but can't tell exactly why they know.

I can picture a cop fabricating images that are obvious, even with a watermark included, while totally convinced that it is undetectable.

There's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.

There used to be - probably still are - cameras that would digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.

I suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos, with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc.

We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.

You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.

The end-game is that people will willingly surveil themselves 24/7 on behalf of The System because that will be the only way to prove what they didn't do.

I’m still shocked we have not seen an extremely convincing AI video of a famous person or world leader announcing something huge like UBI or WW3 or aliens.

Surely it’s just a matter of time.

Some people still believe in polygraphs.

It'll no doubt shift the probabilities but people have always lied and faked data. With video coming out of Ukraine there are a lot of fake things but beyond AI glitches you can check who the source is, if it correlates with known events and so on.

I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.

The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.

You'd also think that police blatantly lying (with or without AI) in official documents and/or in court under oath would trigger immediate firing and a ban of them ever serving in law enforcement in any capacity ever again. But no.

That is a lot of words just to say "fabricating evidence".

Yes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?) benefit of the doubt they have earnt.

If you think the police don't fabricate evidence on the regular, simply because their hunch doesn't match the fact or because they don't like the suspect, then you are way too gullible. Back in the day they just planted a baggie of drugs on you.

> it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air.

Yet we have many examples of this precise thing happening. This is because the police carry immense credibility when testifying. This is also why the "Brady List" exists.

> the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created

How? Just pure skill? Again, we can see from appeals court proceedings, they miss details all the time. The system of "public defense" in the United States is severely lacking.

It matters little what you think, if that’s not what happened.

> what I think is much more likely is the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they “enhanced” it

Doesn't iphones do this by default? The camera isn't actually that sharp, instead it fills in the details so it looks sharp, and sometimes it adds things that were never there. Can easily see it adding a gun in a blurry photo of someone.

So almost everyone uses AI to forge evidence then.

What would the defense do with fabricated evidence? Say that evidence is fabricated? Okay, the prosecution will say it's not fabricated, now what?

There is a tremendous amount of cases you can look up where cops wholesale fabricate evidence. Why wouldn't they use chatgpt to do it as well?

> but what I think is much more likely

My mind went straight to using the AI to write a statement and the AI made stuff up, which would be a nearly guaranteed outcome from using existing LLMs for that task, and it's exactly the sort of thing that I'm sure many officers are doing ... and it could go a fair time before it was discovered.

Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…

Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.

Sadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.

Forensics is the art of manufacturing evidence to convict people.

Ok that's a bit aggressive, but it's important to understand the limits of forensic science, the broken incentives, and systemic lack of rigor in the application of various analyses and products to inculpate/exculpate suspects after the fact.

Over all time? Probably tens of millions.

As an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?

I'd wager that it was just a shortcut to getting his work done. That banal motive is why we've seen an explosion of these cases and why they won't stop.