Much like hallucinations, deepfake material has posed very real and significant challenges to courtrooms, Chief Justice Andrew Bell has said.
A superior court judge was recently targeted in an artificial intelligence-manipulated video, or “deepfake”, that falsely showed them confessing to a crime against an infant and a “life-damaging criminal history”.
Chief Justice Andrew Bell of the NSW Supreme Court said that far from the “crude” dubbing of foreign films in the 1980s and 1990s, this deepfake material had the ability to fit the words exactly to the motions and movements of the judge’s mouth as they spoke.
Had the creator wished, the video could have been adjusted to a certain accent or made to mimic “their Honour’s precise accent” by applying the judge’s “particular intonation and pronunciations”.
In another shocking example of deepfakes in the legal profession, Chief Justice Bell pointed to reports of an AI avatar being used to deliver a deceased victim’s impact statement directly to the alleged killer.
“The scope for mischief and, still worse, fraud as a result of the increasing sophistication of technology able to generate ‘deepfake’ evidence, both audio and video as well as documentary, is great and will present significant forensic challenges to courts and the bar in the years ahead,” Chief Justice Bell said in a speech to the Australian Bar Association.
The Chief Justice said the threat of deepfakes lies in the ease of creation via widespread and free apps and the difficulties in detection.
Deepfake material has also contributed to the “liar’s dividend” phenomenon, where genuine evidence may be claimed to have been digitally altered and authenticity is increasingly challenged.
Quoting Professor Lilian Edwards – referenced in a judgment of Justice Melissa Perry – Chief Justice Bell said the “problem may not be so much the faked reality as the fact that real reality becomes plausibly deniable”.
Where many cases turn on documentary or audio-visual evidence, Chief Justice Bell warned that deepfakes are real and will increasingly pose “a significant threat to the administration of justice”.
“There have always been skilful forgers of documents, but the ability of artificial intelligence and related technology to generate apparently genuine images and documents is alarming,” Chief Justice Bell said.
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
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