Comment by constableclaude
1 day ago
The headline evokes ideas of creating a video of a suspect perpetrating the crime but what I think is much more likely is the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they “enhanced” it. Since “enhancing” is letting AI fill in the gaps it would be using AI to “create evidence”.
Regardless of what they did, tampering with evidence is completely unacceptable and should result in their dismissal and conviction but I don’t think the story will transpire to be as attention grabbing. A well meaning idiot could convince themselves that enhancing evidence is somehow justifiable whereas it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air.
Creating evidence out of thin air would be ridiculous because evidence is available to the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created (as the defendant would be able to recognize what they do or did not do) whereas “enhancing” an image could be easily spotted by other officers. “How come this photo is clearer than the last time I saw it?” “Oh I ran it through ChatGPT to clean it up! Neat, eh? Just like on CSI!”
That is a lot of words just to say "fabricating evidence".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBkWtDAPBY De-crop
Their word is evidence and their employer is the prosecution. This is the fabric of prosperity.
FWIW their employer is not the prosecution. UK police don't prosecute cases, the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) does.
The word of a police officer, in UK law, is that of any other witness. There is a kind of presumption of regularity in the courts, but they don't have any sense of qualified immunity; they are generally but not universally considered not personally liable for negligence but that is not guaranteed them.
And unlike police departments in the USA they don't really have much latitude to experiment with technology. IMO they should be banned from using AI tools that aren't centrally provided.
Other than that, yes — I agree with your general view that this is an alarming state of affairs for people in a position of trust.
If we want to solve a problem, intent matters.
Yes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?) benefit of the doubt they have earnt.
Honestly, I didn't tell it to add that gun to the picture, it did that on its own!
you're quite right, every single one of them is actively trying to kill each and every one of us. To consider any other possibility would be hysterical.
I see what you did there[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis
... Police in the united states have more than a century of flagrant misconduct under their belts. They protect their own, they almost never face consequences for killing people, they are frequently corrupt, they are frequently biased.
Here's a couple fun examples:
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-enforc...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
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It matters little what you think, if that’s not what happened.
What would the defense do with fabricated evidence? Say that evidence is fabricated? Okay, the prosecution will say it's not fabricated, now what?
The judge will decide if the evidence is admissible or not.
> what I think is much more likely is the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they “enhanced” it
Doesn't iphones do this by default? The camera isn't actually that sharp, instead it fills in the details so it looks sharp, and sometimes it adds things that were never there. Can easily see it adding a gun in a blurry photo of someone.
So almost everyone uses AI to forge evidence then.
This exact situation came up during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution wanted to present an image of Rittenhouse. It was materially important whether or not the picture depicted Rittenhouse with a raised gun; I looked myself and couldn’t tell because it was a dark picture from a distance (if I remember correctly, it was a still from a drone video). Since the relevant part of the image was so small, the prosecution was going to zoom the photo in on an iPad, but the defense objected on the basis that the iPad zoom algorithms could be inserting detail not present in the original image.
This seemed a plausible enough objection to me. Although a fairly techy guy, I was (and am) not familiar with the specifics of Apple image processing, but at the time I had a vague awareness that Apple had been heavily advertising its use of AI algorithms to improve the quality of images. Whether that affects zooms specifically I don’t know—but it’s not an outlandish question.
The judge did an eminently reasonable thing: he disallowed the zoomed evidence on its own, but allowed it to be re‐entered if the prosecution provided an expert witness to testify that zooming the photo didn’t meaningfully change it. For this, he was pilloried by the tech media.
Take Ars Technica, for example: they used the headline “You shall not pinch to zoom: Rittenhouse trial judge disallows basic iPad feature,” and prominently displayed the judge’s words “I know less than anyone [about technology],” as if the right thing for a judge who knows nothing about technology to do would be to determine the merits of technical evidence on his own rather than ask for an expert witness. It’s not like it would have been hard for the prosecution to find one. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/rittenhouse-tria...
Anyone who’s experimented with even non‐AI‐based upscalers knows that changing the algorithm can connect or disconnect catty‐cornered objects, introduce curves, and so on. I was shocked (well, not that shocked, given the heavily partisan interest in the case) that the tech media was so confident zooming an image couldn’t possibly meaningfully change it.
In the end, the image was displayed on a big‐screen TV (which probably used some other upscaling algorithm like bilinear, not that anyone in court was technical enough to point it out). The prosecution asked whether/asserted that Rittenhouse had raised his gun in the image, and Rittenhouse said it was not raised. So the exact details of how the small few pixels in the image got upscaled turned out to be pivotal in the end after all.
And it is possible that resulting image is a better match to reality than the raw data coming out of the camera .
iPhones, no, there's no AI replacement or synthesis of objects from the camera. There were Android phones doing this (famously I think it was Samsung where it would replace images of the moon with a different image of the moon), and the Photos app has AI manipulation features. And most of the time, Apple's noise removal algorithm actually removes detail from images, most notably making text and straight lines wobbly.
> iPhones, no, there's no AI replacement or synthesis of objects from the camera
This is AI. Its not generative AI if that is what you mean, but it is AI altering the image and adding things that wasn't there, usually its fine sometimes it fails horribly and make the picture totally different.
https://x.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968
4 replies →
Yes, iphones do process images using AI.
If you think the police don't fabricate evidence on the regular, simply because their hunch doesn't match the fact or because they don't like the suspect, then you are way too gullible. Back in the day they just planted a baggie of drugs on you.
> Back in the day they just planted a baggie of drugs on you.
Thank god that never happens anymore. I'm sure the bodycam era has ended all of that misbehavior and one could not possibly go to YouTube and find videos of cops in possession of that unique blend of corruption and stupidity that would lead them to plant drugs while being recorded. Ahem.
There is a tremendous amount of cases you can look up where cops wholesale fabricate evidence. Why wouldn't they use chatgpt to do it as well?
> it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air.
Yet we have many examples of this precise thing happening. This is because the police carry immense credibility when testifying. This is also why the "Brady List" exists.
> the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created
How? Just pure skill? Again, we can see from appeals court proceedings, they miss details all the time. The system of "public defense" in the United States is severely lacking.
> but what I think is much more likely
My mind went straight to using the AI to write a statement and the AI made stuff up, which would be a nearly guaranteed outcome from using existing LLMs for that task, and it's exactly the sort of thing that I'm sure many officers are doing ... and it could go a fair time before it was discovered.