Artificial intelligence has enabled the creation of realistic and convincing synthetic identities that can be used for various criminal purposes such as online fraud, identity theft, cybercrime, and criminal social engineering. Daily, news reports document the harm such activity is inflicting on innocent people. Unfortunately, as AI technology advances, so too will the sophistication of criminals specializing in these types of crimes. In the very near future, AI-enable crime is going to become a substantial part of police investigative workloads.

While many police agencies recognize AI-enabled deepfake images used to facilitate crime as a increasingly more prominent crime category, the overwhelming majority of police investigators have little knowledge, training or experience in dealing with the impact of synthetic images as instrumentalities of crimes.

FPI Fellow, Chief Phil Lukens (ret.) has written an important and useful article that provides an overview of the phenomenon of AI generated identity, its potential impacts and the strategies policing can use to prepare for these types of investigations.

Click here to read the full article. Click here to access Lukens’ Substack where he discusses a wide breadth of AI issues impacting policing.