Thursday, October 16, 2025
Legal Mayhem Thursday: The Threat of Sora
For the past twenty years, the criminal-law project of getting to truth has been aided by the ubiquity of video evidence. It's hard to do anything in public (or, sometimes, in private) without it appearing on a dash cam, a security cam, an ATM cam, body-worn police cams, etc etc etc. When I worked at the County a few years ago, I was shocked at the way video evidence had transformed the way cases are made-- and how much more reliable it was than eyewitness testimony.
That's all could go out the window soon as deepfake videos with remarkable realistic qualities undermine the worth of real videos. As the New York Times put it in a recent headline, "A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good That You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes."
The videos above are all fakes made with Sora 2, the leading-edge tool to make deepfakes.
The impact on both civil and criminal law could be significant. It is the job of attorneys to cast doubt on the evidence brought by the other side, and now authenticity will become almost impossible to establish. And that, my friends, could change everything as fewer truths are brought to the surface by institutions we count on to do just that.
