Technology

"Your honor, the evidence shows quite clearly that the defendent was holding a weapon with his third arm."

If you ever encountered an AI hallucinating stuff that just does not exist at all, you know how bad the idea of AI enhanced evidence actually is.

No computer algorithm can accurately reconstruct data that was never there in the first place.

Ever.

This is an ironclad law, just like the speed of light and the acceleration of gravity. No new technology, no clever tricks, no buzzwords, no software will ever be able to do this.

Ever.

If the data was not there, anything created to fill it in is by its very nature not actually reality. This includes digital zoom, pixel interpolation, movement interpolation, and AI upscaling. It preemptively also includes any other future technology that aims to try the same thing, regardless of what it's called.

I think we need to STOP calling it "Artificial Intelligence". IMHO that is a VERY misleading name. I do not consider guided pattern recognition to be intelligence.

How long until we got upscalers of various sorts built into tech that shouldn't have it? For bandwidth reduction, for storage compression, or cost savings. Can we trust what we capture with a digital camera, when companies replace a low quality image of the moon with a professionally taken picture, at capture time? Can sport replays be trusted when the ball is upscaled inside the judges' screens? Cheap security cams with "enhanced night vision" might get somebody jailed.

I love the AI tech. But its future worries me.

I’d love to see the “training data” for this model, but I can already predict it will be 99.999% footage of minorities labelled ‘criminal’.

And cops going “Aha! Even AI thinks minorities are committing all the crime”!

Imagine a prosecution or law enforcement bureau that has trained an AI from scratch on specific stimuli to enhance and clarify grainy images. Even if they all were totally on the up-and-up (they aren't, ACAB), training a generative AI or similar on pictures of guns, drugs, masks, etc for years will lead to internal bias. And since AI makers pretend you can't decipher the logic (I've literally seen compositional/generative AI that shows its work), they'll never realize what it's actually doing.

So then you get innocent CCTV footage this AI "clarifies" and pattern-matches every dark blurb into a gun. Black iPhone? Maybe a pistol. Black umbrella folded up at a weird angle? Clearly a rifle. And so on. I'm sure everyone else can think of far more frightening ideas like auto-completing a face based on previously searched ones or just plain-old institutional racism bias.

According to the evidence, the defendant clearly committed the crime with all 17 of his fingers. His lack of remorse is obvious by the fact that he's clearly smiling wider than his own face.

clickity clackity

"ENHANCE"

AI enhanced = made up.

The fact that it made it that far is really scary.

I'm starting to think that yes, we are going to have some new middle ages before going on with all that "per aspera ad astra" space colonization stuff.

Why not make it a fully AI court and save time if they were going to go that way. It would save so much time and money.

Of course it wouldn't be very just, but then regular courts aren't either.

This actually opens an interesting debate.

Every photo you take with your phone is post processed. Saturation can be boosted, light levels adjusted, noise removed, night mode, all without you being privy as to what's happening.

Typically people are okay with it because it makes for a better photo - but is it a true representation of the reality it tried to capture? Where is the line of the definition of an ai-enhanced photo/video?

We can currently make the judgement call that a phones camera is still a fair representation of the truth, but what about when the 4k AI-Powered Night Sight Camera does the same?

My post is more tangentially related to original article, but I'm still curious as what the common consensus is.

You'd think it would be obvious you can't submit doctored evidence and expect it to be upheld in court.

For example, there was a widespread conspiracy theory that Chris Rock was wearing some kind of face pad when he was slapped by Will Smith at the Academy Awards in 2022. The theory started because people started running screenshots of the slap through image upscalers, believing they could get a better look at what was happening.

Sometimes I think, our ancestors shouldn’t have made it out of the ocean.