By: Ishita Chatterjee, Alben Jicho
Testifying from memory, documents, or expert opinion have long been accepted as types of evidence in court. The third category is generated by AI — a product that resembles testimony, reads like a document and is confident of being an authority, but isn't in the law. A facial recognition match, a predictive policing risk score, a detection report of the ability to clone a voice, AI-generated CCTV footage and a generative reconstruction of a crime scene are increasingly being arresting items in the Indian courtroom. The problem is no one, not even the machine, its manufacturer or the investigators who operated it, can be subjected to the kind of cross-examination that can be allowed for a human witness. This presents a real accountability void that the profession should be addressing head-on, not simply by ignoring AI-generated records as another variant of electronic record.
