On yesterday's show, Sagaar and Ryan talked about Sora and AI video creation. Both seemed to take this as a very minor issue, but I want people to consider just how dangerous it could be in a criminal case.

The video they displayed showed a person stealing. In another video I saw, I saw an AI generation of a theft.

The danger of these videos is two fold

1) In our digital ecosystem, videos like that can and will be spread around the internet like wild fire. Malicious actors can and will create videos depicting crimes that never happened, but will stir up reactionary backlash. In the late 80's George H W Bush ran the Willie Horton ad to great effect. Now imagine for a moment, anyone, anywhere, can create a video of a crime that serves their political ends. Does our society have the media literacy to navigate fact from fiction?

2) Inside the court room is even more dangerous. If a person created a video depicting someone committing a crime and turned that video over to police, that alone would probably suffice to get to probably cause for an arrest. Under the Laken Riley Act, an accusation of certain offenses (like petty theft) could be enough to get you an ICE detained. Now, ICE could just make AI videos of immigrants they want to target, and boom, there's your accusation. In a criminal case, probable cause can get you arrested and jailed. Cops can then say, we have video evidence of you committing this crime, and trust me, most cops arent going to verify the authenticy of a video before arresting a person. Once youve been arrested, you're likely facing pre-trial confinement if you can't afford cash bail, you're likely unable to afford to hire a lawyer, but you're likely in a jurisdiction where public defense is woefully underfunded. So, you'll get one, but they might not have the time to really interrogate the video evidence. You might also be in a jurisdiction where prosecutors just don't turn everything over or threaten to rescind a plea deal if they are required to do more work.

I really, really fear for what these AI videos will do in the hands of bad actors and it should not be treated as something that just produces slop (although that will be most of what it does).