ICS Colloquium: Sandra Ristovska, PhD., Associate Professor, College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, University of Colorado Boulder

Talk title: Beyond Deepfakes: How AI Makes Old Problems New in the Legal System

Abstract: As AI-based images become increasingly common, questions about how courts determine what counts as credible visual evidence are critical for the pursuit of equal and fair justice. Public and policy discussions often focus on technical fixes, such as digital watermarks, metadata verification, content credentials, provenance standards, and detection tools. While such measures play an important role, the challenges go beyond verifying whether an image is authentic. What happens when visual evidence is contested? How do legal institutions determine which photographs and videos to trust, and how do judges, attorneys, jurors, and witnesses decide what to believe? This talk, based on a book-in-progress, examines how those decisions are made and why they matter. It argues that the evidentiary challenges associated with AI are neither unprecedented nor reducible to questions of technical authenticity. Instead, they emerge from the legal procedures, institutional authorities, and viewing practices that have shaped interpretations of photographs, films, and videos in U.S. courts for more than 150 years. Credibility, the talk contends, is not a property of images but an outcome of legal and social practices.

Bio: Sandra Ristovska is associate professor of media studies and law, by courtesy, at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is the founding director of the Visual Evidence Lab. An award-winning author, her research has been cited in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Nation and other news media nationally and internationally. She has held fellowships with the American Bar Association’s Scientific Evidence Committee, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and the Central European University’s Center for Media, Data & Society.