Tech experts at OpenAI and Meta warned a federal judicial panel on Thursday that AI-generated "deepfakes" are becoming so sophisticated that it will become increasingly challenging to determine the authenticity of audio and video evidence presented at trial.
The companies' representatives and other experts shared their views during a meeting in Boston of the US Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, which for three years has grappled with how to police the risks of fabricated AI-generated evidence in court.
"AI images are only getting better, and I do not think that there will be a scientific way going forward to detect them," OpenAI policy counsel Shira Anderson told the committee.
"Media generated from frontier models, at least in the last few generations, are indistinguishable by humans from authentic or AI-generated media," said Devin Norder, director of product management at Meta. "And the cost and the time it takes to create this media really are quite trivial at this point."
The panel has struggled since 2023 with how to address authentication issues related to deepfakes. A survey by the Federal Judiciary Center found that out of 931 judges who responded, only 15 had encountered a case in which a litigant challenged evidence because it was a deepfake. US District Judge Jesse Furman, who chairs the panel, said courts had not actually seen a great deal of that yet.
Major companies have adopted tools aimed at verifying visual content, and new laws in California and the European Union require watermarking aimed at detecting deepfakes. But Anderson warned that because each company has its own system, there is no universal means to reliably detect all watermarks or verify authenticity.