Federal judges meeting in Boston heard tech industry warnings that AI-generated images and video are becoming nearly impossible to verify, as a judiciary committee considers whether courts need new rules for evidence that may be deepfakes instead of the real thing.
Reuters reports that the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules has spent three years, since 2023, studying how courts should handle evidence that may have been faked or altered using artificial intelligence. At Thursday’s meeting, representatives from OpenAI and Meta told the panel that detecting such fakes is only going to get harder.
“AI images are only getting better, and I do not think that there will be a scientific way going forward to detect them,” said Shira Anderson, OpenAI’s policy counsel.
Devin Norder, Meta’s director of product management, told the committee that the latest generation of AI models produces media that people simply cannot tell apart from the real thing. “Media generated from frontier models, at least in the last few generations, are indistinguishable by humans from authentic or AI-generated media,” Norder said. He added that producing convincing fakes no longer takes much effort or money: “And the cost and the time it takes to create this media really are quite trivial at this point.”
Both companies have built tools meant to verify whether visual content is authentic, and lawmakers have started moving the same way. California and the European Union have each passed laws requiring “watermarking” designed to flag AI-generated material. But Anderson cautioned that no single system can catch everything, since different companies’ tools don’t talk to each other. “My guess is that this absolutely will continue to get better. I do not think it’ll ever be bulletproof,” she said.
Despite the warnings, the committee has found little evidence that deepfakes are actually showing up in courtrooms. A survey released in March by the Federal Judiciary Center, the judiciary’s research arm, polled 931 judges and found that only 15 had handled a case in which someone challenged evidence as a deepfake. US District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan, who chairs the committee, pointed to that gap between prediction and reality. “There’s a lot of academic commentary and other commentary predicting that courts will be dealing with deepfakes, but we haven’t actually seen a whole lot of that yet,” Furman said.
