Andrzej Skupień (Bio)

The Witness Who Believed the Algorithm. On the Crisis of Testimony in the Age of AI.

The criminal trial rests on a phenomenological cornerstone: the testimony of the witness. “I saw it with my own eyes” has, for centuries, carried immediate epistemic weight because seeing is directly given to consciousness. The witness does not infer, she experiences the event as present. This prereflective certainty is what makes testimony actionable in law.

Deepfakes using AI algorithms shatter this foundation. When video and audio can be synthesized without any underlying event, the phenomenological givenness of “I saw” no longer guarantees that anything actually occurred. The witness is not lying, her experience is authentic. But the world has changed, the correlation between subjective perception and objective fact has been broken by technology. The result is not mere error but a crisis of testimony, the law no longer knows what to do with a witness who genuinely believes she saw something that never happened.

I argue that this crisis cannot be solved by better detection tools alone. The problem is deeper, our phenomenology of vision never anticipated a world where seeing becomes decoupled from being. The concept of evidence, the experience of truth as self-givenness, assumes that intuitive presence correlates with actuality. Deepfakes exploit a gap that classical phenomenology did not foresee, the possibility of full intuitive presence without any corresponding state of affairs.

The paper proposes a new phenomenological category for jurisprudence, informational trust without ontological grounding. Courts must learn to treat testimony not as a direct window onto reality but as a form of information that requires independent verification, not because the witness is unreliable, but because the technological mediation of perception has made reliability a systemic rather than individual property. This shifts the burden from the witness’s consciousness to the informational chain that produced the evidence. Only then can the law recover a working concept of truth without naive realism.