State of Connecticut v. Swinton Ruled that admission of digitally enhanced evidence was allowed. This is going to be a long road full of nuance before we land on a largely socially accepted test for how much adjustment is allowed in court cases.
There's a good rundown of many relevant cases in different US jurisdictions here [0]. It looks like up through the date of publication courts were pretty consistent in ruling that digitally enhanced images may be admissible if it can be shown that they are accurate replicas of an original and the enhancement was only used to make things that were already in the image more clear.
In the case of AI I do think that that will be harder to prove, because there's no specific algorithm that you're following that can be shown to be unable to introduce misleading artifacts.
AI enhanced images (as in enhanced with generative Ai) have nothing in common with digitally enhanced images, other than maybe they're both done in digital form. The process, how the image is transformed and result are wildly different and must be treated differently.
> At the trial, the state (plaintiff) introduced photographs of a bite mark on the victim’s body that were enhanced using a computer software program called Lucis. The computer-enhanced photographs were produced by Major Timothy Palmbach, who worked in the state’s department of public safety. Palmbach explained that he used the Lucis program to increase the image detail of the bite mark. Although the original photographs contained many layers of contrast, the human eye could perceive only a limited number of contrast layers. After digitizing the original photographs, Palmbach used the Lucis program to select a particular range of contrast. By narrowing this range, certain contrast layers in the photographs were diminished, thereby heightening the visual appearance of the bite mark. Palmbach clarified that the Lucis program did not delete any contrast layers; rather, the contrast layers that fell outside of the selected range were merely diminished. Indeed, nothing was removed from the original photographs by the enhancement process. Palmbach also testified that the Lucis program was relied upon by experts in the field of forensic science. The trial-court judge found that the computer-enhanced photographs were authenticated. Because the photographs satisfied the other requirements for admissibility, the trial-court judge admitted the photographs. Subsequently, the jury convicted Swinton. Swinton appealed.
Perfect example. Digitally enhanced in this context should mean "bring out the details of already captured photons - so our eyes can see better" and nothing else. Generative AI is completely different. It's even in the damn name!
No? There is no nuance here. The Swinton case is afaict a discussion on basic deterministic contrast increase.
There is no element of "AI enhancement". AI enhancement means "apply a statical model to make up information that is not present in the source data". Even if you take AI to be something more than a glorified statistical model, it cannot add any detail that is not in the original data. What it can do is, based on the biased training data, create imagery that looks real and can (1) make jurors believe the image presented are real (because the statistical model is geared to making plausible imagery) and (2) introduce details that are useful to the side presenting the images. The first is bad because it means the jury believes the fake image over the lower quality source data because it looks better despite being fiction, and the second is no different from asking someone to improve the image in photoshop.
