Can you completely trust your evidence? Is it easy for a nefarious individual to fake a surveillance video and, based on this doctored material, convince a judge or jury to make a specific ruling or verdict?

Imagine a jury is watching evidence in your trial. A video of the suspect committing murder is playing. The video is clear. The suspect can be identified. His voice is heard. The victim's mother shouts, “My baby!” The verdict is now a forgone conclusion. He's convicted and executed. Years later you learn the video of the murder was doctored.

You had no reason to second-guess the authenticity of that video. It looked and sounded genuine. That's the problem with deepfakes; you think you're viewing factual footage. These videos could alter a jury's perception of reality. These videos could sway voter opinions, alter the results of a trial, ruin reputations or even incite violence.

In December 2017, a Reddit user called “deepfakes” put faces of celebrities on pornographic video clips. The word is a mix of “fakes” and “deep learning,” which refers to the type of artificial intelligence (AI) used to create these images. The word deepfakes quickly morphed to mean any type of falsified videos using a technique for human image synthesis based on AI.

As technology improves, it will become more and more difficult to differentiate between authentic and falsified videos. Deepfake technology is becoming more affordable and accessible. Will video evidence lose the status as trusted evidence? When presenting to a jury, video is powerful evidence to influence a trial, and that's what makes deepfakes so dangerous.

In a recent article, Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said, “Deepfakes get at a concept that is very important in both encryption and cybersecurity more generally: authentication. She added, “AI is now capable of generating fake human faces, which I for one cannot detect any telltale signs that it's not a real photo.” She noted the abuse of the tools used to make a fake video is only going to get worse and expects to see litigation about the growing problem. Pfefferkorn predicts that a call for more qualified experts to help weed through the deepfakes on their way to courtrooms will be the future protocol. “This is such a cutting-edge issue that there are only a few people who right now are qualified enough to give expert opinions as to whether or not something is a deepfake.”

Without qualified experts to authenticate potentially questionable video, juries might be swayed by arguments to not take certain evidence into their consideration.

How can this emerging problem be eliminated? One way is through analyzing and carefully controlling the chain of evidence. A strong chain of evidence would prevent falsified video from being entered as evidence. Since there would be no doubt as to the source of the evidence, a judge would feel confident to admit it.

Another way to combat deepfakes is a constant attention and vigilance to recognize artifacts and signs left by computers that create these videos.

Hollywood is able to reproduce historic events with great accuracy and realism, such as the D-Day scene in “Saving Private Ryan.” In fact, the realism in this scene was so believable that some veterans had to leave theaters.

Until now, courts haven't been concerned about this Hollywood technology being used with evidence, so why is the issue being raised now?

Because creating such realism in films and television was expensive and required a lot of expertise to reproduce. Now, the technology being utilized by deepfakes is a bigger threat because it is becoming accessible to the general public at low cost and with minimal education or training.

The risk of fake evidence is higher today and only becoming greater. A good chain of evidence, along with creating and improving systems to sniff out fake video and audio, is key to preserving authenticity at trial.

David Notowitz is the founder of NCAVF. He is an Emmy award-winning producer and multifaceted video and audio forensic evidence expert. His specialties include news, documentaries and commercial video production. Notowitz works as a forensic video expert witness on cases investigated by police officers, detectives, private investigators, insurance investigators, public defenders and criminal defense attorneys, as well as work with private civil and criminal attorneys and large corporations across the United States.