Tech Tips

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Pages: 38
• Citation: Vol. 46 No. 3 Pg. 38
• Publication year: 2023

Tech TipsVol. 46 No. 3 Pg. 38Wyoming Bar JournalJune, 2023

Tech Tips

Blake A. Klinkner

Blake Klinkner is a professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

What Attorneys Should Know About Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence is advancing at a startling pace, and society is grappling with artificial intelligence's potential to be both beneficial and harmful. "Deepfakes" are one of the harms enabled by artificial intelligence that has begun to show artificial intelligence's potential to spread misinformation, sow distrust, and enable fraud and other criminal acts. Law and technology experts have also begun to sound the alarm on the threats which deepfakes may pose to fair adjudications in courts of law, as artificial intelligence has the potential to permit inauthentic evidence to be admitted at trial while simultaneously allowing authentic evidence to be rejected based upon improper claims of inauthenticity.

"...it will become necessary for attorneys to rely upon artificial intelligence to detect deepfakes; stated differently, we will need to rely upon artificial intelligence to detect the works of other artificial intelligence, thus leading to an arms race between deepfake creators and deepfake detectors."

In a "deepfake," artificial intelligence is used to create a new—and fake—image, video, or audio, based upon a "sampling" of actual images, video, or audio of a real person. For example, deepfake technology could scan video of an actual political speech delivered by a real politician, and then create a fake video purporting to contain a speech delivered by that same politician. The term "deepfake" is derived from the process used to create fake images, videos, and audio, which uses "deep learning" algorithms that process real life data (such as voice patterns and images of a real-life speaker) to then produce fake output (such as phony audio and video of that same speaker).

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