Murdered Man Addresses Arizona Court In AI Video

An AI-generated simulation of a murdered man has addressed an Arizona court in a striking use of emerging generative AI technology.

The avatar of Christopher Pelkey spoke in Maricopa County Superior Court on 1 May to present a victim’s statement before a judge sentenced Gabriel Paul Horcasitas for shooting and killing Pelkey in a 2021 road-range incident.

The video, in which Pelkey is pictured against a white background, was generated by his family members to allow him to address the court in what they believed would have been his own words.

‘Powerful tool’

“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI image says in the video. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.”

“I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have and I still do,” the avatar says in Pelkey’s voice.

Family members provided voice recordings, videos and photos of Pelkey to create the video, his sister Stacey Wales told media outlets.

Wales wrote the words spoken by the avatar and said she worked with her husband and a family friend, who both work in the tech industry, to create the video.

She told Reuters she is not herself ready to forgive Horcasitas, but felt her brother would have had a more understanding outlook.

Generative AI is a “powerful tool” that the family tried to use in a creative way, she told the BBC.

Judge Todd Lang said the family was “justifiably angry” but that he felt the forgiveness expressed in the video was “genuine”.

Legal setting

The use of AI is typically restricted in legal settings, but was permitted in this case as sentence had already been passed on Horcasitas, who is to spend 10.5 years in state prison for manslaughter and endangerment offences.

Two years ago, in May 2023, a lawyer was reprimanded for using the emerging technology to create a legal brief that turned out to cite a number of entirely spurious cases that had been wholly generated by the technology he had used, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Later in the same year a city in southern Brazil passed a law that had been generated by ChatGPT, with the lawmaker who created the document saying it had taken the tool 15 seconds to provide the required text.