Court Holds AI-Generated “Victim Statement” Not Reliable

Oh, generative AI … is there anything you can’t ruin? Shut up, Claude or whatever your name is. That was a rhetorical question. As you may recall, last May an AI-generated video was allowed to speak at the sentencing of Gabriel Horcasitas, who was convicted of manslaughter for killing Chris Pelkey during a road-rage incident. According to Pelkey’s sister, in the course of collecting victim-impact statements she kept thinking, “What would Chris say?” Eventually, someone also thought, “What if we imagined what he would say and then used AI to generate a video in which he appeared to be saying it, and showed that in court?”And then that actually happened. On September 30, the Arizona Court of Appeals held that it should not have. If you’re wondering, as I did, whether anyone was hurt in the stampede of lawyers trying to object to this, the surprising answer is that apparently no one did. But that is less crazy than it seems under the circumstances. I’m not too surprised the prosecution…