Two developers have used OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generation model to create a forensic sketch program that can create “hyper-realistic” police sketches of a suspect based on user inputs.

The program, called Forensic Sketch AI-rtist, was created by developers Artur Fortunato and Filipe Reynaud as part of a hackathon in December 2022. The developers wrote that the program’s purpose is to cut down the time it usually takes to draw a suspect of a crime, which is “around two to three hours,” according to a presentation uploaded to the internet.

“We haven’t released the product yet, so we don’t have any active users at the moment, Fortunato and Reynaud told Motherboard in a joint email. “At this stage, we are still trying to validate if this project would be viable to use in a real world scenario or not. For this, we’re planning on reaching out to police departments in order to have input data that we can test this on.”

AI ethicists and researchers told Motherboard that the use of generative AI in police forensics is incredibly dangerous, with the potential to worsen existing racial and gender biases that appear in initial witness descriptions.

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