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  • Hacker News
  • Can we know the motivation? Will it get them a bonus at the end of the year? Was it something common in the cases, maybe similar victims or something else?
    by tamimio
  • I'd wager that it was just a shortcut to getting his work done. That banal motive is why we've seen an explosion of these cases and why they won't stop.
    by delichon
  • This is probably using AI to remove a background or object from an image, not a 6 finger perp.
    by brador
  • I saw this headline, saw that it was Sky news, thought "oh a British policeman? Bet it was Derbyshire police".

    There you go.

    by dofm
  • As an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?
    by danielvaughn
  • Long a police practice (it happened to me) that AI makes easier.
    by jibal
  • I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
    by radicaldreamer
  • Over all time? Probably tens of millions.
    by madaxe_again
  • Forensics is the art of manufacturing evidence to convict people.

    Ok that's a bit aggressive, but it's important to understand the limits of forensic science, the broken incentives, and systemic lack of rigor in the application of various analyses and products to inculpate/exculpate suspects after the fact.

    by duped
  • Sadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.
    by gdulli
  • Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.
    by tyingq
  • Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…
    by gcr
  • 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!”

    by constableclaude
  • 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?
    by thatguy0900
  • What would the defense do with fabricated evidence? Say that evidence is fabricated? Okay, the prosecution will say it's not fabricated, now what?
    by inigyou
  • > 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.

    by Jensson
  • It matters little what you think, if that’s not what happened.
    by kubb
  • > 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.

    by themafia
  • 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.
    by tsss
  • Yes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?) benefit of the doubt they have earnt.
    by Chinjut
  • That is a lot of words just to say "fabricating evidence".
    by xorcist
  • Maybe use the word “falsify”?
    by tim-tday
  • Such a case should trigger a auto revision on all cases said officer ever touched.
    by warumdarum
  • You'd also think that police blatantly lying (with or without AI) in official documents and/or in court under oath would trigger immediate firing and a ban of them ever serving in law enforcement in any capacity ever again. But no.
    by Eddy_Viscosity2
  • per ft.com: https://archive.fo/BIOej

        [The Derbyshire Police] declined to give more detail
    about what the evidential material consisted of.
 
    The term [evidential material] can be used to
    describe witness statements.
    by WarOnPrivacy
  • I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.

    The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.

    by wahern
  • i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.
    by bobthepanda
  • It'll no doubt shift the probabilities but people have always lied and faked data. With video coming out of Ukraine there are a lot of fake things but beyond AI glitches you can check who the source is, if it correlates with known events and so on.
    by tim333
  • Some people still believe in polygraphs.
    by happymellon
  • I’m still shocked we have not seen an extremely convincing AI video of a famous person or world leader announcing something huge like UBI or WW3 or aliens.

    Surely it’s just a matter of time.

    by testing22321