AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court
170 comments
·March 11, 2025fhd2
mitthrowaway2
I agree. The article didn't touch on this aspect, but we're now at the point where even authentic recordings could be plausibly denied and claimed to be fake. So the entire usage of recordings as evidence will suffer a hit. We may essentially be knocked back to an 18th century level of reliance on eyewitness testimony. One wonders what the consequences for justice will be.
Ukv
I wouldn't say we'd be quite back to pre-photo evidence days. I feel a lot if not most of the value in a video/audio recording is not just that the medium has traditionally been difficult to edit, but that it's attesting to a lot of details with high specificity. There's a lot to potentially get caught out on with not a lot of wiggle room when inconsistencies are spotted (compared to recalling from memory). Document scans and static images are still useful despite having long been trivial to edit, for instance.
dartos
I think forensic analysis of photographs would reveal pretty quickly if they’re AI anyway.
AI images of real life still don’t pass intense scrutiny.
thereddaikon
There's already a process for this, its called chain of custody. If you cant prove the evidence has a solid chain of custody then it was potentially tampered with and isn't reliable.
AnthonyMouse
The usual chain of custody goes something like: The store has a video surveillance system which the police collect the footage from, so the chain of custody goes through the store and the police which implies that nobody other than those two have tampered with it.
But then you have an inside job where the perpetrators work for the store and have doctored the footage before the police come to pick it up, or a corrupt cop who wants to convict someone without proving their case or is accepting bribes to convict the wrong person and now has easy access to forgeries. Chain of custody can't help you in either of these cases, and both of those things definitely happen in real life, so how do you determine when they happen or don't?
mrandish
Yep, "chain of custody." Came here hoping to see that concept discussed since it's how the system already deals with cases of potential evidence tampering. If the evidence is of material importance and there's no sufficiently credible chain of custody, then its validity can be questioned. The concept started around purely physical evidence but applies to image, audio and video. The good thing about the ubiquity of deepfake memes on social media is that it familiarizes judges and juries with how easy it now is to create plausible fake media.
LPisGood
This is unironically a usecase for blockchain.
_DeadFred_
This is such BS. The government is ALWAYS deferred to when the chain of custody is broken because 'good faith' is applied. As long as 'good faith' is rountely dispensed 'chain of custody' is nothing but propaganda for the justice system not an actual tool used for justice.
As long as chain of custody ca be discarded because 'good faith' whenever it becomes inconvenient it is not a real thing.
nine_k
I can easily imagine a future where video evidence is only acceptable in the form of chemically developed analog film, at resolutions that are prohibitively expensive to model, and audio recordings of any kind are not admissible as evidence at all. Signatures on paper, faxes, etc are, of course, inadmissible, too.
pmontra
The point of a signature on paper is that (at least in my country) you can summon somebody in court and ask "is this your signature"? If they say it is, it is, even if it does not look much like any of their other signatures. Then there might be a suspect of false testimony or being blackmailed etc but that's not always the most important issue in a case. E.g.: if it is a contract and all the signers state that they agree with its terms, then there is no much else to discuss.
AyyEye
> we're now at the point where even authentic recordings could be plausibly denied and claimed to be fake.
We've been there for at least two years.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/judge-slams-tesl...
datadrivenangel
Digital forensics will continue to be an in-demand skill!
SoftTalker
Have you ever heard some of the wiretap or hidden microphone recordings used to convict mafia bosses back in the 1980s? It was so bad I can't believe it was accepted. It could easily have been faked. The only thing that made it work was the sworn statements of authenticity from the people who did the recording, and the chain of custody thereafter.
qingcharles
I know a lawyer who was convicted on one of those. The detectives had the mic + transmitter taped to his groin so it would get through a pat down. Then the undercover just spoke both sides of the conversation (the defendant's side was whispered and muffled). Someone testified it sounded like the defendant. Conviction was overturned on appeal on a simpler issue unrelated to the evidence.
In fact, I remember a drug dealer I was helping with his defense. Hidden mic on undercover was taped under his armpit. He arrived to defendant's hotel room for a deal and defendant made him undress. The recording is hilarious because defendant is like "You fucking snitch, what's that under your armpit?" and the undercover says "It's my .. er .. MP3 player?" LOL
siva7
So what happened to him?
trhway
>But ultimately: Humanity has coped without photo, audio or video evidence for most of its existence.
which allowed to burn witches based on testimony of citizens in good standing.
And that leads us to using Neuralink and similar tech and the next gen lie detectors (like say the defendant's fMRI (most probably interpreted by AI too:)) to look into the brain and extract confession. No need for evidence, deposition and all that expensive time consuming stuff standing in the way of truth especially given that it can't be trusted anymore in the face of AI capabilities.
EGreg
I kind of want to have an LLM which takes absolutely any criticism of AI or news of it doing something bad and then generates a plausible HN comment that basically goes "I don't think it's a new problem, X has always been possible, there's nothing really new"... because that comment always appears like clockwork beneath it :)
fhd2
Strangely, I'm not even offended by the notion that an AI can replace this work I apparently do :D Though my thought here was just pure optimism in the face of something bad, not an attempt to frame a bad side effect of something good as not a big deal.
When it comes to generative AI, I personally don't see a lot of good applications, but a plethora of bad ones. The only solution I could imagine would be regulation to the degree that using or distributing models with certain capabilities is just illegal. Judging from the war on file sharing a few decades ago, probably very difficult to enforce, even if it is perhaps still worth doing.
But I don't see any governments line up to do it. Given that, this particular (semi) new development that generative AI is effective for evidence tampering, I think we'll manage to deal with it.
throwway120385
The nuance that's usually missing is that new technology invariably enables the same things but more of them and faster.
consteval
Everyone misses this all the time.
Most problems can be overlooked because they’re not that prolific. There’s a chain of events that really hinges on that assumption.
For example, piracy is really not a problem. In fact I’m pro-piracy most of the time. But if everyone could pirate with no thought and no down time, I don’t think our economy will survive. Just because something is okay in small doses doesn’t mean it scales well. We understand this intuitively with substances, but not with technology like LLMs.
pixl97
A snowflake isn't an avalanche, but if you let them build up, there is potential.
dragonwriter
I mean, you are already getting the result for free, so why do you need an LLM for it?
In any case, you can probably do this with a fairly simple prompt with any LLM.
RataNova
That's a great point. The ability to undermine real evidence by claiming it's AI-generated could be just as (if not more) damaging than fake evidence itself
pixl97
Well, and to generate fake evidence to lead cops off the trail for the longest period of time possible. Evidence could be said to contain a half life. The longer (real) evidence is not gathered the more it can decay in one way or another. For example security footage gets overwritten. Actual witness memory gets foggy. Physical items get thrown away.
If the cops spend the first month going after some poor Mark that had nothing to do with it, by the time they realize they've been had it will likely be much more difficult to catch the actual perp.
Also, that's saying nothing about the court of public opinion.
RataNova
And given how quickly narratives form online, even if the truth eventually comes out, public opinion might not catch up
kenjackson
> I don't think it's _that_ widespread. Just like it's possible to lie on the stand, but people usually think twice before they do it, because _if_ they are found to have lied, they're in trouble.
I don't have data, but I suspect a LOT of people lie on the stand. This is mostly based on what I see on reality court shows and true crime type shows, so admittedly not a great sample, but I figure once something gets to trial things are going to be contentious.
HPsquared
At this stage it's more a risk for people who have their likeness out in the public domain where it can be copied. But that's just about everyone these days.
vasco
> But ultimately: Humanity has coped without photo, audio or video evidence for most of its existence. I suppose it will cope again.
Same argument for electricity, the internet, sanitation, democracy... doesn't seem like a great test for stuff that we just didn't have it before and survived.
fhd2
Well, I'm not arguing "good riddance". I just optimistically think we'll manage. I wouldn't want to miss any of the things you listed, actually. I'd also prefer evidence tampering to be impossible or at least very difficult. But that's not a call I can make. All I can decide about things out of my control, is how I think about it. And here I'm carefully optimistic.
vasco
But your argument for why we can live without audio or video evidence was that we lived like that before. All I'm saying is that's not a great argument. You can probably come up with other arguments and they might be perfectly valid.
rickandmortyy
[dead]
treetalker
I question the wisdom of setting the judge up as a superjury / gatekeeper for this kind of situation. This seems like a reliability / weight of the evidence scenario, not a reliability / qualification of the witness scenario (as with an expert witness).
Why would the judge be better qualified to determine whether the voice was authentic, as opposed to the witness? And why should the judge effectively determine the witness's credibility or ability to discern, when that's what juries are for?
All that said, emulated voices do pose big problems for litigation.
_DeadFred_
You mean like expert witness polygraphers that were treated as fact by the courts for years and still used to re-incarcerate people on parole/probation?
Or gun matching (ballistics) that are no longer considered conclusive but subjective? https://www.mdcourts.gov/data/opinions/coa/2023/10a22.pdf
Hair and Fiber expert analysis that was wrong? https://innocenceproject.org/fbi-agents-gave-erroneous-testi...
Or do you mean bite mark analysis that was again wrong?
Many of these forensic methods were used for decades and presented/treated as conclusive evidence before being challenged leading to wrongful convictions. But yes, let's have 'certified' voice experts whose living is based on being hired by the government and giving testimony to convict people. Surely this time it will be altruistic and scientific.
klipklop
What always worried me is that nobody ever challenged these methods. We just accepted it as fact. Endless crime tv shows reenforce that these methods are infallible. People that watch these shows then become jurors. Scary.
SoftTalker
Cops looking at blurry 240p video frame. "Enhance!" and suddenly it's 4k.
bluGill
I don't know what the latest is, but often judges are supposed to not allow "expert testimony" without checking that the person is an expert. However this is a really complex area. Judges don't want to be the one deciding a case, but not allowing some "expert" is in a way deciding the case.
zusammen
There’s a built-in design paradox. How does a judge assess an expert in a field where he is not one? There’s probably some improvement that comes from experience but it’s not perfect.
stogot
Qualifications=academics usually & career experience. No way to know if they actually learned something and aren’t a fraud. Even corporations that do thousands of interviews get duped
bluGill
Opposing lawyers have an incentive to help the judge. Of course the lawyers will lie, but they still will point out important details for the judge to look at.
hiatus
Isn't it up to the opposing party, and not the judge, to impeach an expert?
ARandumGuy
If it was solely up to the opposing party, then they'd strike down every single expert. The judge still is the ultimate decider on what evidence (including expert testimony) is admissible.
null
RataNova
But I think the argument here is less about judges making definitive calls on authenticity and more about ensuring that clearly questionable evidence isn't automatically admitted just because a witness vouches for it.
whywhywhywhy
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect comes to mind.
NoMoreNicksLeft
Excluding fake evidence is very much a responsibility of the judge. In the age of Fox News, letting the jury decide for themselves whether or not made-up bullshit is actual evidence seems like a recipe for disaster, and not necessarily one that errs on the side of caution.
treetalker
To the contrary, in US courts the jury determines whether evidence (documentary, testimonial) is credible or not, and what weight (if any) to assign it. (Experts, à la Daubert etc., are a different matter because they give expert opinions, not factual evidence based on personal witnessing of the events in the case, so the judge does perform a gatekeeping function, essentially to ensure the underlying field/science is reliable.)
While certainly Fox News headlines would not reach the jury in most instances, that is on account of hearsay, lack of qualification, materiality, relevance, and similar rules. It is not a prior credibility or weight determination by the judge, as I understand TFA to be advocating. So: did the witness hear a voice that he believed to be the one in question? If so, jury gets to decide (unless unfairly prejudicial or some other overriding rule comes into play).
pharrington
IANAL, and I am assuming you are a lawyer - I interpreted @NoMoreNicksLeft as saying that it's a judge's responsibility to determine whether or not evidence is admissible - before it gets to a jury. And that's also what the article is talking about - "The examples should illustrate circumstances that may satisfy the authentication requirement while still leaving judges discretion to exclude an item of evidence if there is other proof that it is a fake. "
NoMoreNicksLeft
>While certainly Fox News headlines would not reach the jury in most instances, that is on account of hearsay,
Nor should obviously fake evidence reach the jury. They can judge for themselves whether testimony is credible, but this is far different than admitting faked evidence. And if you can't see the difference, I'm not sure I'm qualified to explain it to you.
dghlsakjg
How is AI voice faking any different than any other type of faking? How is it different than a manipulated recording, or a recording where someone is imitating another?
It is just as easy to fake many paper documents, and we have accepted documents as evidence for centuries.
Photos can be faked, video can be edited or faked, witnesses lie or misremember.
Is this just about telling lawyers that unvetted audio recordings can be unreliable? Because that shouldn't be news.
Edit: this is a good faith question. I'm legitimately just curious. Splicing and editing have been around since recording was invented, I was legitimately curious why voice recordings would have been given extra evidential weight when manipulating recordings is a known possibility.
rout39574
Presuming good faith here, faking recordings has been harder to do, easier to detect, and less equivocal in the past than it is now.
If it takes an FX house to generate a plausible recording of me saying something I didn't say, that's a risky enterprise with a lot of witnesses.
If my enemy can do it in their basement with an hour of research, the exposure risk goes way down, and consequently the expectation you'll see it in real life goes way up.
null
ceejayoz
Nuclear weapons require nation-state levels of resources. Now imagine you can build one in your basement for $10k. Does that change things at all?
dghlsakjg
I understand what you are saying, but my point is that I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that. It wasn't Manhattan project levels of effort before this.
This seems more like people losing their minds over 3d printed guns, when hobbyists with a drill press have been making guns in the garage for decades.
Yeah, its easier now to fake voice, but its not as if what this article warns against wasn't possible before the latest AI hype cycle. And it is also worth noting that voice cloning/changing technology is not particularly new either (I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade).
I agree that courts should be cautious around accepting voice recording evidence, I just don't think that the ability to do this is new.
Majromax
> I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity,
Cutting up what recordings, exactly? If you're mixing-and-matching, you need a pretty broad corpus of source material with fairly consistent recording quality (background noise, etc), and even still you're limited to reproducing words that are already present. You can't cut-and-splice together a recording of me saying 'Yes, dghlsakjg, I embezzled $1 million and blew it on the ponies' because there will be no recording of me saying your username, 'embezzled', or 'ponies.'
The problem comes with the voice-cloning technology that can construct entirely new sentences based on relatively short voice profile samples.
> I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade
You've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman because of specific, hard tuning work put into the voice changer. Now, you can sound like your boss, or your neighbour, or your ex.
ceejayoz
> I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that.
Sure, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn managed to get quite a bit of nuclear material.
Being able to do it at scale, convincingly, in real-time, for any arbitrary text, with just 30s or so of someone's voice as a sample, changes the calculus a lot.
gdulli
"We've had projectile murder for centuries with arrows, how are these machine guns and missiles any different?"
Lammy
In the future this stuff will get so good that the public will beg to be surveilled at all times because it will be the only way to prove what you didn't do. You will learn to love Total Information Awareness. Consent status: manufactured :)
nostrademons
It could easily go the other way, where the public doesn't care what people think they did or didn't do and just does whatever they want, because they don't respect the state and believe the social contract has been broken. "Fuck justice, talk to my AR-15."
There's ample evidence that this is already happening, eg. recent headlines about kids being radicalized at increasingly younger ages, groups like No Lives Matter that embrace violent nihilism, increased domestic terrorism, record high gun ownership across both sides of the political spectrum, authority figures that just do whatever they want and ignore any form of law or accountability, etc.
bilbo0s
I don't know man?
We're already at a place where most people don't care what other people think of them.
Issue is, as long as the government has the big guns, what the government thinks of you will still matter in a major way.
In such an environment, most people are going to choose to have some kind of way to prove to the government what they did and what they didn't do. Not because they care what other people think as you're implying, but rather because they very much care that the government not get the wrong idea about them. Because the government getting the wrong idea about you can be fatal.
nostrademons
Government is based on the threat of the use of force, not the actual use of force. If you're a government that is regularly using force against a significant proportion of your citizens, you have problems, and probably will not remain the government for long.
I suspect that we're saying the same thing but with reversed causality. Both of us agree that non-deterministic enforcement breaks down the incentives needed for pro-social behavior. You're saying that this will cause people to demand ways to improve the governments enforcement abilities. I'm saying that this will cause people to adapt their behavior to the new, lessened enforcement abilities. In defense of my point, I'd point out that changes to government are a coordination problem while adaptation of behavior is an individual-only response, and it is much easier to effect changes to your own behavior than it is to convince 300 million people to agree on a solution and implement it, particularly when the root problem is a lack of enforcement ability.
PolieBotics
I've developed a novel approach to creating tamper-evident video via cryptographic feedback loops between projectors and cameras. The process works as follows:
1. A projector displays a challenge pattern (Perlin noise derived from of a hash) 2. A camera captures this projection 3. The system hashes the captured image concatenated with the previous hash and uses it to derive the next projection 4. This chain demonstrates true temporal sequentiality that's difficult to forge
By incorporating random noise derived from Byzantine Fault Tolerant networks and using these networks as timestamping servers, the proofs inherit the network's decentralization properties. ML then confirms that the feature distributions in projection-photograph pairs match expected patterns from the training dataset.
Demo video and GitHub repo available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliePals/comments/1j8qm2j/truth_be...
o11c
There are actually (at least) 3 different places where cryptography is needed here:
* Proof that this starts after a given time. Traditionally this has used methods like "this is the headline of a major newspaper today", which is limited to 1-day granularity and has problems if you can just generate a large number of expected headlines and use them in parallel. But with crypto, we can just query any random-number-timestamp-signing server, and a network of such servers can mutually sign each other's previous packets so it's very reliable both against downtime and against attacks.
* Proof of sequencing. This is trivial with a chain of hashes, though it does prevent recompression.
* Proof that this ends before a given time. This requires actively submitting your signature data to a timestamp server for additional signing, which is a much more complicated task than the initial half. It is still possible to eliminate the single source of vulnerability, but much more work.
"Camera looks at monitor" is going to be a much cheaper way to make this air-gapped than adding a projector. And this doesn't strictly need to be continuous; most things are tolerant of one-day granularity and almost everything of 15-minute granularity.
PolieBotics
Largely true, although submitting timestamp hashes to the blockchain is probably the easiest bit.
"Camera looking at a monitor": While that might be simpler in some setups, it doesn’t really solve my main issue. I want the signal to permeate the entire scene, not just appear in the corner of a display or overlaid on the video. By projecting the challenge onto all visible surfaces, we create a physical environment that’s difficult to fake (since you’d have to convincingly generate or remove those patterns in real time). Air-gapping isn’t really the goal right now.
Finally, we're need much finer granularity than 15 minutes! The point is to lower the generation time below what is achievable via generative model.
Thank you for the comment, and I hope these clarifications are useful. It's a new concept, so please forgive the clumsiness with which I may be communicating it.
o11c
"The blockchain" is just a wasteful way of doing things compared to the plain crypto.
"Overlay the entire scene" doesn't actually appear to add any information-theoretic value compared to simply bounding the timestamp at which the video was made. Nothing either of us is talking about will actually prevent fakes (before the camera signs it), only constrain the time at which the fakes are made.
Slower-than-real-time generation of fakes is still significantly inhibited by the fact that the hash sequence can be checked for continuity across long lengths of time whose bounds are verified using the other steps.
asddubs
pretty clever, kind of like cipher block chaining
PolieBotics
Thank you! It is indeed a little like a signature based on proof-of-projection.
As they say, once you have a signature, you have a most of a cryptosystem. I've been experimenting with those and other applications of non-linear functions in projector-camera systems.
recursive
Here's my plan.
1. Cryptographically hash each piece of media when it's recorded.
2. Submit the hash to a "trusted" authority.
3. It will add a timestamp and sign the result.
4. Now, as long as you keep the original, without re-compressing, and you trust the authority, you have some evidence that the media existed at a timestamp. On or before.
This doesn't prove authenticity, but in many cases, establishing a timestamp would be enough. Forgeries probably wouldn't be created until later, after the shit hit the fan.
Or maybe this doesn't work at all.
AnthonyMouse
Thieves are planning an inside job. They forge the surveillance video ahead of time, do the theft and submit the forgery to be timestamped while it's happening.
Also, a lot of surveillance systems are purposely kept offline to prevent them from being compromised, but your system doesn't allow that because they would need external connectivity to get signatures.
lolc
Sure when you're controlling the source, you can fake it. But requiring the fakes be prepared ahead of time locks the faker into one story that may be contradicted by other evidence.
AnthonyMouse
That's pretty much what happens anyway. The police are going to come collect the footage as soon as the crime is reported and you can't change it after they do.
Edman274
This technique is known as an Ella Fitzgerald to those in the heisting industry, as popularized in the documentary Oceans 11.
AnthonyMouse
Oceans 11 is a work of fiction because most people don't have that skillset and the ones who do can make a lot of money doing honest work without risking a long prison sentence, so they're not tempted to rob casinos to heisting music.
The issue here is that the skillset required to produce the forgery has fallen to the level that anybody can do it and then that's enough people that somebody actually does.
coppsilgold
You can do this already by yourself or use a service which you need not even trust.
Every x seconds, collect all the pieces of data that need to be notarized as existing in the world prior to some time t. It can be an arbitrary amount of data.
Construct a Merkle Tree[1] of all the hashes (or HMACs) of all the data to be notarized. Compute the Merkle Root. Make sure that everyone gets their Merkle Proof (path from leaf to root) or publish the Merkle Tree publicly.
Embed the Merkle Root into a one or more cryptocurrency blockchains to exploit their immutability guarantees. By either including it as "additional data" to some transaction or just straight up as a fictional cryptocurrency address.
Every piece of data processed in this way will have a Merkle Proof (cryptographic path from hash of the data to the Merkle Root) that proves it existed prior to the creation of the Merkle Root. The Merkle Root will have its creation time bounded by the proof of work conducted on the cryptocurrency blockchain.
recursive
There are some tradeoffs here. You need to do currency transfers get a timestamp, with all the constraints that comes with. But you get probably a more trustworthy authority.
HPsquared
Isn't this basically achieved by standard cloud storage on phones? Photos and videos get uploaded automatically (with authentication for the user account) and presumably that action is logged somewhere the user can't edit. Just need to prove those logs are secure, and there you go.
echoangle
Unless you’re they police in a murder case, you’re probably not going to get google or apple to give you something that certifies that a file was uploaded before a specific time and not modified after. And just showing me the modification date in the UI wouldn’t convince me.
HPsquared
Much easier with the account holder's consent, it's probably in the "data download" thing you can request. And probably available by subpoena. It's like phone records.
I don't mean "date modified" in the file metadata when it's uploaded (of course that could easily be spoofed before upload) but the actual "date uploaded". You know something must have been made before a certain time.
tgv
I'll say it again, even though it is rather unpopular here: there has never been a need to develop these tools, nor one to make them easy to deploy, nor one to make them easy to use. Yet all this has happened, and now it may occur that someone is acquitted because AI generated media is so good, the evidence might be artificial. If that happens, and the suspect commits another crime, it's on the conscience of the people that contributed to this. You cannot create something and pretend its use has nothing to do with you.
The tools aren't perfect yet, so it's not too late to stop. Stop the ridiculous image and audio generation tools before it's too late. Nothing of value is lost when these models are made private again, and research is simply halted.
cootsnuck
It actually is too late for that. For anyone unaware, the open source models are already more than sufficient enough for imitations and deepfakes. For better or worse there's no going back.
Personally, I'd rather we all know this tech is out there and develop defense mechanisms rather than thinking hiding it away will prevent harm.
The cyber security industry exists because of all the privacy and security issues posed by all the tech we already have had for the past several decades.
I'm confident the same will happen for AI simply because it is a business opportunity and other businesses and institutions are already talking about these issues.
bdangubic
You cannot create something and pretend its use has nothing to do with you.
has always worked with guns so it'll always work with anything else :) and guns will kill more people that AI-generated shit for foreseeable future
almogo
There is an argument that "AI-generated shit" (on social media, or otherwise) can influence elections, and thus war. The best example I can think of is https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68918330.
consteval
Text, images, and things of that class - human communication tools - are much higher level than guns.
Human communication tools are responsible for, say, the holocaust. At its core, you can distill the holocaust to that. Or choose any tragedy, really.
I think what we’re dealing with is much worse than we are giving it credit. I’m envisioning the death of trust as a concept itself. Such has never before been faced by humanity, and I don’t know if even our biological social circuits can handle it.
We’re already half way there. It’s trivial to convince large amount of people of something that isn’t true, and then get them to act on that belief. It just requires some time and some money. Remove the time and the money requirement and I don’t know where we land.
qwertox
I do want a computer which talks to me like a person, with that agility. I am used to listening to voice.
I am tired of reading so much stuff which could well be spoken to me. Like this comment here, which you now need to read.
It's only very recently that living beings on this world have learned to read and write, it's not normal. It's normal to communicate through sound.
krainboltgreene
What an incredible line to end on. “It’s not normal to read/write”.
qwertox
I'm not aware of any other species which is capable of reading and writing. But many can certainly hear and make sounds.
null
Loughla
>It's only very recently that living beings on this world have learned to read and write, it's not normal. It's normal to communicate through sound.
It's normal for humans to communicate via sight and sound combined.
That being said, we invest a lot of calories and brain power into vision. It's our primary mode of interacting with the planet. This is what we have evolved to rely on.
I think, therefore, you're wrong. We rely heavily on eyesight, naturally. It's why our eyes are focused on the front, allowing precise binocular vision, whereas our ears are on the side, allowing for broader coverage, but less specific information received. Reading and writing (or at least some form of image communication) is probably more natural for communicating ideas than talking, for humans.
Even if you are still trying to average us out across other life on earth (which doesn't really make a bit of sense), I think vision is the way to go. Colors and visual attractants and other visual forms of communication are common even in plants, as well as animals.
triceratops
Reading and writing isn't "normal" but using a computer is? Humans have been doing the former for way longer.
gowld
You don't need writing, if you want to live in a cave or wander a prairie, I guess?
Ukv
> Nothing of value is lost when these models are made private again
To list a few uses I see for voice-generation/cloning tools:
* Real-time translation of a user's voice, maintaining emotion and intonation
* Professional-quality audio from cheap microphone setups (for video tutorials, indie games, etc.)
* Allowing those with speech impairments to communicate using their natural voice again, or:
* Allowing those uncomfortable with their natural voice to communicate closer to how they wish to be perceived
* Customization of voice assistants, such as to use a native accent/dialect
* Movies, podcasts, audiobooks, news broadcasts, etc. made available in a huge range of languages
* And of course: memes, satire, and parody
If it exists but isn't widely accessible, it's likely in the hands of Musk/Zuck and and various state actors. To me that seems possibly the worst alternative - to have the public generally unaware that it's possible and receiving few of the benefits listed, yet still having it available as a tool for competent disinformation.
educasean
Fatalities due to automobile accidents are a major drag. We should've stuck with horses
a2128
There is some use to bringing deepfakes to mass adoption. The thing is that since the tech exists, powerful actors with lots of resources will develop these tools for their own use either way. The question is whether they'll be able to fool the masses who are unaware that such realistic deepfakes can exist, or whether they will have no effect as everyone and their mom have already seen similar AI slop on their Facebook feed
pixl97
>The tools aren't perfect yet, so it's not too late to stop
This is some serious level of cope for HN.
Simply put, it's not going to happen.
gortok
What shocks (and irritates!) me is that Charles Schwab keeps wanting me to set up voice ID. Why would I want to set up a voice ID for something that is now trivially spoofed?
alamortsubite
When was the last time you encountered this? I remember getting nags up until around the end of last year, but not lately. I like to think they dropped the program because I expressed concerns about it to so many reps, but more likely I've just been dialing in on a different number.
gortok
Today. I get an interstitial every time I log in that tries to get me to enable their VoiceID system (here's a screenshot): https://georgestocker.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/schwabv...
alamortsubite
That's crazy. Well, I guess I'll keep at them.
MichaelDickens
Schwab used to have an 8 character maximum on passwords (although at least they changed that). They have never been a paragon of good security practices.
SoftTalker
They've presumably been good enough that their losses are less costly than better security.
carra
Wait some more time and photos or even video recordings will be deemed just as dangerous. And then what? Even if there is real evidence, it will have to be discarded unless it can't be sufficiently validated. It will get very hard to prove anything.
bluGill
Or perhaps camera manufactures will start putting traces in. Anyone who makes surveillance systems (like stores use) should put some end to end things in so they can say "this camera took that recording and we can see that it wasn't tampered with by...". (if anyone works for a surveillance company please run with this!) With encryption we can verify a lot of things, but it sets the bar higher than someone took a picture.
Of course in a darkroom someone skilled could always make a fake photo - but the bar is a lot lower with AI.
AnthonyMouse
Cryptography doesn't really fix it. There are a zillion camera makers and all it takes is one of them to have poor security and leak the keys. Then the forger uses any of the cameras with extractable keys to sign their forgery.
Or they just point a camera at a high resolution playback of a forged video.
This also assumes you can trust all the camera makers, because by doing this you're implicitly giving them each authorization to produce forged videos. Recall that many of these companies are based in China.
gs17
> Or they just point a camera at a high resolution playback of a forged video.
Exactly, it's just like DRM or cheating in video games. Even if everything in software is blocked, there's always the analogue hole.
bluGill
The point is the camera maker certifies in court under perjury penalty that their cameras are not compromised and that is their image. "Other camera systems are compromised, but ours is not...".
DrFalkyn
Maybe go back to old school analog. Like they did in Altered Carbon
gblargg
I think the best proof of authenticity is already there, in the quirks each particular camera model has in the recording encoding. It's likely that a forgery would easily be shown to have differences in encoding when compared with a video file from the same camera. It would be more difficult with an audio recorder, as you could just record the AI voice in the room. An audio expert could probably show that the acoustics of the fakery don't match where it was claimed to be recorded.
paulnpace
If it goes that direction, one silver lining could be that they also realize video conference tools used for court proceedings should also go away.
john2x
I wonder if film photography (slide film in particular) will become viable again and that photojournalists will once again become necessary for society.
Rather than cryptography which could be difficult to grok for a non-technical jury, a physical slide of film would be the source of truth.
It can still be faked by photographing a manufactured/generated scene though.
Lanolderen
The smart encryption people will fix it. At some point it had to be fixed anyway since LLMs have only made it less effort.
nottorp
So... those talking head "influencers" who leave multiple hours of voice and video samples on social networking for anyone to download and clone are the most at risk for an attack like this?
lblume
Not necessarily. Recent advancements suggest that just a few soundbites of a typical person's voice already allow modern AI to synthesize it fairly accurately.
exe34
On a related note, why oh why does Lloyds Bank insist on grabbing my voice for login every time I call them? I have to keep saying "no, fcuk off!" a dozen times until it gives up.
RataNova
This is a pretty terrifying problem, especially considering how easily accessible AI voice cloning tech has become. The fact that courts still operate under rules written before AI-generated evidence was even a concept is concerning
Sounds like reasonable changes.
Generally speaking, I think evidence tampering is not a new problem, and even though it's easy in some cases, I don't think it's _that_ widespread. Just like it's possible to lie on the stand, but people usually think twice before they do it, because _if_ they are found to have lied, they're in trouble.
My main concern is rather that legit evidence can now easily be called into question. That seems to me like a much higher risk than fake evidence, considering the overall dynamics.
But ultimately: Humanity has coped without photo, audio or video evidence for most of its existence. I suppose it will cope again.