Lawyers for a man charged with murder in a triple homicide had sought to introduce cellphone video enhanced by machine-learning software.
Lawyers for a man charged with murder in a triple homicide had sought to introduce cellphone video enhanced by machine-learning software.
A Washington state judge overseeing a triple murder case barred the use of video enhanced by artificial intelligence as evidence in a ruling that experts said may be the first-of-its-kind in a United States criminal court.
The ruling, signed Friday by King County Superior Court Judge Leroy McCullogh and first reported by NBC News, described the technology as novel and said it relies on "opaque methods to represent what the AI model 'thinks' should be shown."
"This Court finds that admission of this Al-enhanced evidence would lead to a confusion of the issues and a muddling of eyewitness testimony, and could lead to a time-consuming trial within a trial about the non-peer-reviewable-process used by the AI model," the judge wrote in the ruling that was posted to the docket Monday.
Given AI models’ penchant for hallucinating and the blackbox nature of it all, it seems like it shouldn’t be admissible. AI is fine for creative endeavors, but in arenas where facts matter, AI can’t be trusted.
Oh no, we're still plowing ahead with this self-induced AI nightmare, this is just a speed bump...
Friend Computer always knows what's best for us. All praise the Computer and woe to the Mutant, Commie, Scum who would try to bring ruin upon our beneficent Computer overlord!
Edit: my comment isn't about exactly the same thing, but ..
Some new camera tech might be opening a can of worms about whether what's pictured can be taken literally.
There was a story late last year of a woman trying on a wedding dress in front of two mirrors and someone snapped a photo.
When they looked at it, the reflection on the left mirror had a different pose to the reflection on The right mirror.
And this cast doubt on what exactly was going on the moment the shutter was pressed.
It looks like the camera had one of the stitch together the best photo of the people pictured (e.g. don't show shots of people blinking etc) and it treated the mirror images as different people.
I mean, yeah but in that everything that happened was real, and happen within a second probably at most of eachother. Still definitely permissible. AI is a very different story.
"Your Honor, as you can see from the footage, my client sprouted 7 fingers out of his hand, with such a condition, he couldn't possibly operate a firearm..."
This seems like one of those technologies which may be useful as an investigatory tool, but should ultimately not admissible in court. For example, if law enforcement has a grainy video of a crime, and they use AI enhancement to generate leads, that could be ok. Though, it will still have issues with bias and false leads; so, such usage should be tracked and data kept on it to show usefulness and bias. But, anything done to a video by AI should almost universally be considered suspect. AI is really good at making up plausible results which are complete bullshit.
I would imagine that using an AI to create a video and voice of a defendant to "say" something from a transcript would be much more impressive than someone reading it.
I'm generally against the whole anti-AI stuff these days but this makes perfect sense. There's no way of verifying whether or not the content of an upscaled image is accurate.
My initial thought was, that some phone cameras already do AI video enhancing automatically. This could rule out some important evidence, just because the phone automatically increased contrast or lightened up dark areas, as now invalid.
To expect people to turn those features off before recording, isn't a good option either. This could end badly for some people involved.
On the other hand, well, AI enhancement is correctly pointed out as image manipulation, but a lot happens in the digital video recording process. Now, maybe phones should always save the unedited too, but that would double the space requirements. Maybe if it just saves the filters on top of the original it could be workable.
I'm not blaming anyone for banning AI enhanced videos though, as obviously the alternative is worse.