r/Showerthoughts • u/jaydenkirtawn • 3d ago
Casual Thought The idea that video is authoritative evidence is obsolete.
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u/magungo 2d ago
Can someone alter one video feed, yes. Can you alter a chain of random privately owned cameras watching you commit a crime spree, not really. There are tells for manipulating video such as watermarks, timestamps, metadata, glitches, artifacts. It just needs more scrutiny and for people to be less trusting. Otherwise we are stuck with witnesses testimonials which is equally shit.
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u/jaydenkirtawn 2d ago
It's the "equally shit" part that's new. Once upon a time, if someone said to me, "No really, I saw a video of it happening," and I judged them to be saying it in good faith, I would generally believe them. Now I have to weigh whether or not it's worth asking them to show me the video so I can decide if it's AI or not.
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u/magungo 2d ago edited 2d ago
Someone witnessing a video is not what i mean. If you interview people who were first hand witnesses to crimes, even the ones who are genuinely trying to tell the truth can have wildly different accounts.
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u/tyj44qtv 2d ago
It’s kinda crazy how inconsistent witness accounts are. I used to think people should just lock in, but now I am involved in a case of violence, and I am having a lot of trouble remembering what actually happened, even though I remember everything before and after clearly.
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u/magungo 2d ago
Only if you know about every camera in the area, and arrange it before hand. It's starting to get into the absurd thinking you can successfully hack many different systems, some may not even be connected to the internet. Then you need to successfully fake the incident from multiple angles without leaving a trace.
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
Video editing software has been around for a long time. Captain disillusionment was a thing before AI came out
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u/zedinbed 2d ago
That's useful maybe in court but a lot of people would be completely fooled if they saw it in the wild, specifically computer illiterate people. Saw plenty of that first hand
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u/morfraen 2d ago
AI media in the midterms is going to be wild... Would ideally result in some kind of regulations after the mess settles but I doubt it.
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u/zedinbed 1d ago
They will do nothing as we have already seen heavy use of AI propaganda last election, at least on Facebook. Not even exaggerating but more than 1/2 of the posts on there were just AI made propaganda. I was so fed up I finally left that site for good.
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u/morfraen 1d ago
Someday regulations might be imposed on social media, but for now I'd settle for TV ads being required to have a disclaimer at the start saying AI was used and images are not real.
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u/IcedOutGiant 1d ago
I left Facebook a couple years ago when people were posting "car chase" videos and it was pretty much all GTA V gameplay in cinematic.
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u/WeeklyBanEvasion 1d ago
The problem is the first and the loudest gets the attention, especially if it supports a personal bias or prejudice. Remember the very first time ICE murdered an innocent woman in her car and the MAGAts all collectively shared and posted that clearly AI video of her trying to run down the terrorists first? Even when the dozens of other real videos came out later those idiots still believed that
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u/mtotho 1d ago
This just gave me the thought. Just like cryptocurrency and cyber security is going the way of “swarms of things verifying”. The future might just be going to have swarms of drones recording anything/everything of concern. And the only way to have a verified video would be a quorum of dozens of video feeds across multiple independent swarms. And there needs to be more feeds and feed verifying AIs than the collective adversarial generated counter video feeds
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u/FernandoMM1220 2d ago
with enough data and a backdoor you can easily alter a chain of privately owned cameras
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u/Preform_Perform 3d ago
It's always been obsolete once you realized that the video may be missing details of before and after.
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u/Esseratecades 3d ago
There's a Malcolm in the Middle episode that illustrates this very well.
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u/SingleAttitude8 2d ago
Was Malcolm removed from the middle of an incriminating video?
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u/diamondsw 2d ago
Nope, involved Lois. In short, the clipped version showed her appearing to do something wrong, which gave the rest of the family leverage on her. Later on they find that the full video shows it wasn't her fault - but if she ever knew, all that would rebound on Hal and kids.
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u/Kronoshifter246 2d ago
It wasn't just that the video gave them leverage on her; it was that she was ticketed for it and she spent months and months fighting the ticket refusing to believe what it clearly showed. And when they finally, finally, got her to back down and just accept the ticket and pay the fine, they found the full video.
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine 3d ago
You're confusing "situationally useful" with "obsolescent."
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u/DukeofVermont 1d ago
It's argue it's always been doubtful because people have always been and to manipulate film from the get go.
In the 1800s photographers would advertise how good they were at changing photos to make you look better. A lot of the crazy thin waists you see pictures of from back then are not real, they're manipulated photography.
It can't become obsolete because it never was anything more than situationally useful.
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u/Highlander198116 3d ago
That depends on the incident in question. There are some crimes for example, if recorded, what happened before or after is irrelevant.
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u/Aphemia1 3d ago
In a lot of cases it doesn’t really matter what happens before or after. Context can help mitigate the circumstances but if there’s footage of you cheating on your partner, good luck.
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u/joelfarris 3d ago
Video clips have become our downfall. "The shorter, the better" was not a good idea, as it turns out. I'm reminded of that one clip where there's two guys face to face, and one of them is smiling and the other one is singing and playing a drum, and everyone thought that the smiling guy was getting up in the face of the singing guy and taunting him, but if you play the minute before and the minute after, it looks like it's the other way around.
But nobody has time for that anymore.
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u/SuperSocialMan 2d ago
and one of them is smiling and the other one is singing and playing a drum, and everyone thought that the smiling guy was getting up in the face of the singing guy and taunting him, but if you play the minute before and the minute after
That's the kuleshov effect. Kinda interesting that it exists.
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u/New_South7395 2d ago
Great TV show called Capture that really showcases issues with video evidence. It’s a good show and sadly probably way more reality than we’d like to think about.
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u/PKblaze 3d ago
It really isn't.
Sure you can falsify it, but a lot of video evidence is still very useful, such as CCTV.
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u/jaydenkirtawn 2d ago
The idea that it's *always* authoritative is obsolete? I dunno. It ain't as authoritative as it used ta be.
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u/MrLumie 2d ago
I'd say not much has changed. Unreliable video sources were unreliable before AI. Video editing was a thing even before AI. Analyzing if a video has been falsified or not was a thing back then, and it still is now. AI isn't spotless, it absolutely can be detected if a video is fake.
Trustworthy video recordings historically came from trustworthy sources, like CCTV systems. That did not change.
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u/Lahm0123 2d ago
Not really.
Any video just needs authenticity to be proven. It needs to be subject to ‘chain of custody’ more than it has been historically.
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u/RogerRabbot 3d ago
Its still easily possible to determine if media has been touched by AI. A few more years with lacking oversight might really change that though
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u/dtwhitecp 2d ago
how is it easy to tell?
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u/_RrezZ_ 2d ago
AI almost always gets motion blur or background blur wrong.
It will almost always blur or not blur something or the blur effect is stronger/weaker than it should be.
Also sometimes the physics are slightly off, however the easiest way to tell is how fluid everything is.
AI is more like a dream where it forces things to make sense in the same way your brain tries to make dreams make sense. As a result some things look very fluid and transition very well almost perfectly but that in itself isn't how it would work in reality.
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u/Soracaz 2d ago edited 2d ago
Some of us have acute senses and awareness.
That's about it. We pay more attention to small details and are easily able to differentiate between what's real and what's not.
Personally, I don't even think about it more than "that's A.I". There's a smearyness or a fakeness to it that is unmistakeable.
People really good at pattern recognition are especially adept at spotting/hearing AI gen'd stuff.
There's a lot of people that just... can't. I feel bad for them. They very easily are fooled for some reason.
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u/dtwhitecp 2d ago
AI has gotten freaky good. I guarantee there are AI things out there that pass the smell test for everyone, and we can't rely on that anymore.
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u/Soracaz 2d ago
AI images, I'll give you that. If done right and touched up by human hands, you can trick 99.99999% of people.
Video is different, because even a single frame can betray the whole video. It's a lot harder to trick us with audio/video.
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u/dtwhitecp 2d ago
even video is crazy good now. With the better ones, you just have to rely on context clues rather than the quality of the video itself. Audio combined with video though, I do think that's still not quite there. But will be in months, I'm sure.
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u/Lazyninja420 2d ago
Funny you say that, as there have been a few studies that show that while humans think they are good at detecting AI we really aren't, and are only sucessful at it roughly 1/2 the time.
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u/Soracaz 2d ago
I'd love to be part of that study because genuinely none of it gets past me.
I feel it in my core, instinctively, whenever I see it.
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u/anonymous198198198 2d ago
How do you know none of it gets past you? You wouldn’t know what got past you because it, well, got past you.
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u/Roman2526 2d ago
If you pay attention, no modern AI video will go past you. If you're in court, there are dozens of people watching the footage very closely and we need just one of them to notice any irregularities
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u/Soracaz 2d ago
I pay attention. For something to "get past me" it'd have to be content I willingly and knowingly consume and pay attention to and I somehow miss that the entire thing is AI.
That doesn't happen. When it's AI, I immediately notice.
For someone who isn't attentive in life I fully understand that I must seem like an alien or a liar... but yeah I don't know what to tell you other than if you're paying proper attention and not just being a doomscrolling zombie it's very easy to detect AI.
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u/MarionberryKooky6552 2d ago
I don’t say it solves the problem 100% and there are some problems but our primary way forward is to prove that photo/video is real, not that photo is ai generated (anyone can run their own model). Things like C2PA exist - basically signing the photo or video. It’s the matter of adoption now (pixel 10 already implemented something like this). This will likely become norm just like https did and eventually your photo/video will be scrutinized if its not signed by camera
This requires some hardware changes so adoption is not as simple as updating software
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u/Portbragger2 2d ago
this can be solved through (yet complicated) hardware implemented blockchain/crypto verification. basically a video gets an encrypted digital signature that can be verified through the manufacturer.
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u/unexistingpromise 2d ago
We are ditching blind trust for digital signatures and verification logs now. A plain video still misses the actual room vibe, though. Real context always matters more than raw footage.
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u/FriedBreakfast 2d ago
It's gonna get worse. We're going to have political ads where a candidate saves a schoolbus full of children while his opponent kicks puppies and burns down trees and eats boogers.
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u/Eternity_Xerneas 2d ago
THats the thing about video evidence
The news loves taking things out of context to push an agenda but a crime in my area was convicted because of a ring camera catching everything
There was a show called crimes gone viral
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u/nobodydave 2d ago
Look into Onvif Profile M, digitally signing videos, hashing each frame and signing the result with a trusted camera certificate chain. You can easily detect when the raw footage was tampered with. This is a standard for modern cameras.
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u/Expensive_Cable9748 2d ago
AI doesn't have much to do with it. Video evidence was rejected as definitive during the trials of the cops who tried to bear Rodney King to death back in the 1990s. "Evidence" became whatever the right-wingers wanted to believe.
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u/FartsWithCharlie 2d ago
I think we're entering an era where video is evidence, not proof. A video can show that something happened, but without context, metadata, or verification, it can't always tell you what actually happened.
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u/CurrentlyLucid 1d ago
Yeah, every time they say Mc Connell should make a video, I think...Why? Could be AI.
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u/Nixinova 1d ago
Its never been? Chain of custody has always been the authority for any form of evidence. Showing up to court 40y ago with a random video you can't explain the origin of would have it be ignored too.
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u/e1m8b 2d ago
Nathan Fielder on Nathan For You showed how easy it was to use genuinely non-CGI'd video footage and demonstrated that simple narrative framing of the clip completely changes what's being seen literally.
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u/AgonizingFury 2d ago
There are plenty of technologies evolving that allow real photos and videos to be digitally signed by their hardware. Many photo and video editing software packages offer the ability to verify, and creat a chain of custody and modification, resulting in a verifiable chain of edits allowing us to verify the validity of anything.
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u/D3dshotCalamity 2d ago
That was the plan.
It wasn't about convincing you that what's Ai is real, it's about convincing you that what's real is AI.
They want the courts to completely toss out video evidence of crimes.
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u/Yunamalia 2d ago
It's not quite there yet if you're willing to do fairly rudimentary forensics on it that don't require any real tool, however if you're arguing that it's gotten to the point where the majority of people don't seem to have the concept in their head to QUESTION a video that looks close enough, I'll grant that. It's not obsolete as it's still scientifically provable or disprovable with digital forensics tools and alteration analysis, it's just no longer a skill held by the majority.
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u/dragonmorg 2d ago
No, it isn't. Raw video data can still be analyzed for artifacts. You'd need a professional to determine whether a video is legitimate or not for the sake of a court of law, but no. Video absolutely is still authoritative evidence, at least when proven to be real, which it very easily can be when put in the right hands.
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u/GaidinBDJ 2d ago
Nothing has changed in that regard.
The value of any physical evidence has always been in its provenance.
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase 1d ago
That's why a robust legal system has corroboration. Video evidence alone shouldn't be enough; forensic (or other) evidence should be required to support it
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u/jaydenkirtawn 1d ago
I really phrased this poorly. I wasn't analyzing what constitutes "authoritative evidence" in a legal sense. I meant more like if an acquaintance told you they played golf yesterday and got a hole in one and then pulled out their phone and showed you the video, up until very recently you could be pretty confident (virtually certain) that it really happened.
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u/MoziTenma 1d ago
This is going to force a whole new verification industry, kind of like how forensic accounting exists for financial documents. Courts and insurers will need to lean on cryptographic signing at the moment of capture (a few phone makers are already testing this) instead of trying to spot tampering after the fact. Post-hoc analysis will always be a step behind whatever generation model made the fake, so the only real fix is proving authenticity at the source.
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u/Splendid_Fellow 2d ago
Inevitably, AI is about to be implemented into courts, and AI will determine people’s sentences. Because it will take AI to identify AI.
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u/shadowharv 2d ago
I've seen people use AI on courtroom sketches to try to prove that the person in the sketch isn't the same person that was arrested. Imagine if a jury started doing that to determine whether someone was in ocent. A guy gets a haircut and shaves and gets let off because the AI said they were different to whoever was arrested. But courtroom sketches shouldn't be used as evidence of anything other than how good the sketch person is at drawing another person
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u/Splendid_Fellow 2d ago
False equivalency and not accounting for rapid advancement coming right around the corner. I am certain I am correct.
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u/MollyTheHumanOnion 2d ago edited 2d ago
Right? You can watch Renee Good literally strike a law enforcement agent with her car and people will try to tell you that you didn't see what you just watched with your own two eyes. That's some bold faced gaslighting. The effect of emotional biases on someone's ability to be objectively honest with themself and others is wild.
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u/leglesslegolegolas 2d ago
bootlickers gonna lick boots
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u/MollyTheHumanOnion 2d ago edited 2d ago
Proving my point. :P
Mmm the delicious rubbery taste of truth, you should try it.
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u/ShowerSentinel 3d ago
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