Generative AI Means Publicly Published And Kept Records Are The Only Remaining Reliable Documentary (not physical) Evidence

As an alternative way of speaking: you no longer can present a video, business accounting, government record from an archive that’s not published on the Internet or personal e-mail, and have a jury think that it means something about whether the depicted events occurred.

As an alternative way of speaking: only physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, and records (like live-streams, real estate records of transfer, including monies and bank account aliases) published on the Internet quickly, and left up permanently, could be considered not trivially forgeable by a government or even private individual. (Though of course the physical evidence still could be generated, and the eyewitnesses intimidated)

Practically, this means you require some physical evidence (like shoplifted goods, disability, or a dead body), or a sting/caught in the act, or a denunciation rule backed with highly credible witnesses, to convict anyone of anything. Consider some common criminal acts that no longer are provable beyond a reasonable doubt (though certainly they could be leads e.g. to getting a search warrant):

  • Rapes, where the victim has not signed up for a witnessed public consent registry, or left a longstanding documentation and behavior trail with multiple witnesses affirming repeated testimony and acts, that indicate the victim intended to stay chaste
  • Any child, elder abuse, minor assaults, groping, etc. that doesn’t seriously injure the victim, for which you don’t sit outside in a surveillance van, and burst in when you see the offense
  • Mail-in ballot fraud
  • Petty robberies (that is, of an amount of money for which you would not register the transfer with the government), with no eyewitnesses, particularly with any significant delay in the gathering of video evidence
  • Almost any spying operation in which you didn’t tail the spy to verify the behavior
  • Most money-laundering operations (because there usually is some significant indirection between the ultimate donor and the embargoed recipient)
  • Any conspiracy planning operation, in which you did not directly surveil the exact moment at which the target and means were committed to a criminal act
  • Any automated speeding or similar surveillance-based assessment, that relies on cameras which are not live-streamed

Moreover, to the crimes that are direct surveillance-based, you require independent authorities – that is, randomly drawn citizens – to be party to the surveillance, investigation, house search, etc. Otherwise the trial would tend to boil down to “police vs. citizen testimony” that is a variant of he-said, she-said, for which you should not be able to obtain a conviction.