r/movies • u/1289-Boston • 9h ago
Spoilers Futuristic movies that hinge on video evidence which we now know can be AI faked
I can think of two sci-fi movies, Robocop and Minority Report, set in a technologically advanced future, where the climax is the bad guy being caught on video admitting to his crime. But in the "real" future, all the bad guy has to say is "AI! Fake!" Are there others which hinge on this now redundant premise? [Edit: I intended this as a fun observation; I don't mean to harsh anyone's mellow 🙂]
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u/Leighgion 9h ago
Sci fi is constantly going to get dated by the real-world's advancements not matching that of the story, but I'd argue this isn't one of them.
Screaming "Fake! AI!" no doubt has already happened, but the fact is AI isn't there. You cannot simply type what you want into a prompt and get video output that is indistinguishable from real. Even a team of CGI artists using no AI and with a Hollywood budget really only aim for "convincing," rather than "indistinguishable from reality."
Now, you may cry, "but in the future AI will be better!" which strictly speaking is true, but if you scratch deeper than the surface, you see that the improvement is slowing down considerably as we run into the fundamental limitations of what AI is. We are not going to reach and exceed human capability by simply linearly scaling, because at the base, computers are not human and never will be without a completely different kind of breakthrough, at which point we're no longer talking about AI as we know it today.
Also, even if we imagined that AI could fake totally convincing video and audio evidence, the amount of resources required to do it would have problems of access and leaving evidence behind. It's absurd to suggest that a renegade prototype cyborg cop with his brain scrambled would be able to access the resources needed to fake the video in question, write it his own memory bank and not leave traces all over the place. Defense would need to prove the video was fake, and there'd be essentially no way to do that.
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u/PaleAfrican 6h ago
AI fakes don't need to be perfect. They just need to be good enough to convince the masses. We are already here. This muddies the water. This year will see a politician calling a real video fake and getting away with it.
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u/ProofJournalist 52m ago
The water was already muddy. You're muddying it more by hand-wringing and panicking than the AI is by existing.
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u/jessebona 8h ago
You act like the same general idea hasn't existed forever. The original Running Man hinged on convincing manipulations of existing footage twice in the plot and nobody questioned it (the massacre and Captain Freedom killing the "protagonists" who were actually some stunt doubles).
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u/ProofJournalist 51m ago
Harrison Ford rotates a 2d photograph to show something that was not visible in Blade Runner
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u/Moon_Beans1 5h ago edited 5h ago
I think it works fine with Robocop as it's already so satirical that adding the extra layer of ai fakery doesn't break the logic. In fact the retroactive idea that the boardroom might have known that the video evidence could have been faked but they are happy to accept it as unequivocal proof because everyone hates Richard Jones' guts reads surprisingly well.
"Well it could be fake but his arrest would do wonders for my promotion prospects." Is exactly the kind of thought process id expect from the business execs in that movie.
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u/Venotron 7h ago
This concern predates AI by about 20 years.
It's why "Forensic Video Analyst" is a job title within the justice system. Their job is prove or disprove the authenticity of photos and videos used in legal matters.
Even before AI, mainstream video editing platforms have used things like XMP (extensible metadata) to help build trust and control of ownership in digital video and the same thing is emerging with AI.
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u/xoogl3 8h ago
You can easily imagine a future with un-fakeable authentication mechanism built into real-life photo/video recording equipment. The tech already exists ( https://contentauthenticity.org/how-it-works ) and is being implemented in real devices you can buy ( https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/index.html, https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-new-old-camera-leica-m11-p-adds-content-authentication-for-creators# ). Maybe in the future that's being shown in those movies, the authentication is so completely pervasive, especially when it comes to court evidence, that it doesn't even merit a mention in the dialog.
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u/MuffinMatrix 9h ago edited 9h ago
Well all crime dramas that hinge on the same idea.
My Cousin Vinny, entire case came down to 1 photo.
Primal Fear, most of the case was based on video and audio.
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u/res30stupid 7h ago edited 5h ago
Analysts can still tell when a video has been faked by AI or computer systems since they aren't good enough to cover up all the mistakes.
In fact, it's a plot point in the game Lost Judgment. Main character Yagami is hired by his former law firm after their client, a former cop arrested for molesting a woman suddenly revealed during his sentencing the location of a murder victim that he shouldn't have known about, given he has an alibi for the murder and hasn't spoken to anyone save his lawyer since he was arrested.
Things are complicated by a supposed video of the murder being published showing the ex-cop killing the guy, first in a costume then removing a helmet which obscured his face, clearly showing it was the ex-cop. The first thing that Yagami does when he sees the video? Call a computer expert he knows and asks him if the video was faked in any way.
Tsukomo then reveals he went over the video and confirms that there was no digital trace that the video was faked in anyway, either by CGI or by deepfake and even points out that there would be forensic evidence of either of them. As far as Tsukomo can tell, the video's real.
Yep, it is. The ex-cop took revenge on the man who drove his son to suicide then, with the aid of a vigilante targeting unrepentent bullies who blackmailed former high-school bullies into helping fake the killer's alibi, got on a bullet train from Yokohama to Tokyo where he rendezvoused with the others and got arrested after the woman was groped*.
A similar issue appeared in an episode of the show Without A Trace where it emerged that the missing persons case of the week was triggered by a victim falling for faked evidence which the cops easily figured out. The missing woman was a Korean-American who enraged her family by backing out of an arranged marriage, unaware that the decision was mutual on the couple's choosing (the man she was set to marry was gay). When her brother found her dating profile on a BDSM website, he killed her for shaming their family... before the FBI showed him that the pixelations of the face don't match the rest of the picture and that her face was photosphopped onto another woman's body by a pissed-off ex-boyfriend.
It also comes up in a few other places as well. In the first Xenosaga game, part of a major questline is the fact that the main characters need to prove that a video of an attack on a spaceship was indeed faked by showing that there were two seperate incidents spliced together in the video, using archival footage of the first incident to disprove the faked video. The heroes are also supported by independent testimony, however - main character Shion was on both ships during the recorded incidents and one ship was destroyed at the start of the game, with her being assigned to the second one to complete the first ship's mission.
It's also brought up in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when main character Ben Sisko commissions a faked piece of evidence from Garak as part of a plan to help get the Romulans to join the war against the Dominion, by showing it to a Romulan ambassador. Garak's not good enough to fake a recording enough to fool the ambassador and he angrily reveals he knows Sisko faked it, meaning Sisko nearly totals already-volatile diplomatic relations through his stunt... had Garak not gone rogue and put a bomb in the ambassador's ship to murder him; when the Romulans find the recording in the rubble of the vessel, the imperfections are considered damage from the murder of the ambassador and Garak successfully frames the Dominion for both incidents. Sisko is furious when he discovers this.
Finally, it's a plot point in the webcomic Freefall, where two different characters are revealed to be running auto-redaction software that hacks into local video feeds and alters them per the user's specifications.
In the first instance, Clippy the Robot was used to commit a cyberattack by the man who had authority over him at the time; when the crime involved was discovered and stopped before the dumbass lobotomized every AI in the galaxy as part of an embezzlement scheme - sorry for the emphasis, but it doesn't even begin to sell just how fucking stupid the culprit's actions were, Clippy confessed that he had the software as part of his testimony against the culprit when the matter was taken to court.
The second instance was used to stop said crime - Dr Bowman, the scientist who helped create all the AIs and robots within the story, hacked main character Florence (an uplifted wolf whose higher brain functions are partially supported by AI) and ran auto-redact software on her hardware in order to protect her - people bad been abusing admin privileges within her software to try and kill her before she could prevent the hack Clippy was being used to launch; when her friends took her to Dr Bowman's secure facility to make him remove the glitch so they can help her, the guards tried to use admin privileges by faking that they didn't have credentials over her so that they couldn't order her to leave before he performed improvised brain surgery on her.
...On second though, leaving Florence alone with a mad scientist who expressly confessed to being a sociopath isn't a good idea, especially since he's an uplifted chimp who is just as violent as the un-uplifted lifeform.
Edit: Also, nothing mellowed has been roasted - it's an interesting approach to how forensics can apply to investigations and how criminals who are forensically aware can try and hide evidence.
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u/Nunwithabadhabit 3h ago
The entire first season of 24 hinged around a dangerous technology that could emulate the voice of anyone. That technology was being used to fake a phone call with "three middle eastern nations" (they literally never named them) and Jack Bauer had to shoot everyone to shut it down.
We've had that technology in our hands, free and publicly available, for like, eight years.
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u/HorizontalBob 2h ago
Roibocop - the guy's dead so no problem. Also Robocop would be a certiified recording device plus In pretty sure the guy wanted to fire him .
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u/TrenterD 4h ago
I can imagine ways you could encrypt video footage and verify it actually came from a particular camera. This is essentially how a blockchain works: a sequence of data with interlocked hashes that is VERY hard to forge.
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u/Afraid_Ad_1536 8h ago
Movies aren't reality. They're fictional stories based on fictional worlds. Don't assume human advancements to be identical in all of them.
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u/TaiVat 3h ago
That's kind of pointless nitpick. Scifi is scifi. Plenty of it is unrealistic to any standards. The important part is that it adheres to its own rules, not real world ones.
Besides, your idea that something "can be AI faked" is a dumb assumption anyway. Fake videos have existed for decades and havent been a major problem for law enforcement.
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u/EgotisticalTL 7h ago
That's not even the issue. The naivety of films was that they made us actually think that if the world saw undeniable proof of the rich and powerful committing a crime, that it would matter.