AI-Generated Mugshots Help Arizona Cops Identify Suspects

An Arizona police department is among the first in the nation to use life-like, AI-generated suspect sketches in an effort to generate tips from the public on open cases.

The Washington Post reported that the Goodyear Police Department has used AI twice this year to generate suspect images. The first was in April for an attempted kidnapping case, and again this November for a shooting. Unsurprisingly, both cases remain open, and the images have not led to any arrests. But experts warn that this new tactic could further complicate the already tricky process of identifying suspects.

The images were produced by Mike Bonasera, a forensic artist who has been drawing police sketches for about five years, the newspaper reported. In a typical year, he is asked to sketch up to seven composite drawings when police lack clear surveillance images.

Earlier this year, Bonasera began uploading some of his old sketches to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He claims the resulting AI-generated portraits closely resembled the real suspects to which the drawings had been matched. In April, he was cleared by department leaders and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to begin using AI in new cases.

Bonasera says he works with witnesses directly as he generates the images, allowing them to suggest changes in real-time. He told the Post that the department received a flood of tips after releasing the first AI-generated image in April, which convinced him to repeat the process in November.

“We’re now in a day and age where if we post a pencil drawing, most people are not going to acknowledge it,” said Bonasera.

Experts interviewed by the Post warned that AI-generated images can bake in biases based on the datasets the models train on. They also noted that these images could face more scrutiny in court.

“In court, we all know how drawing works and can evaluate how much reliability to give the human drawn sketch,” Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote The Washington Post in an email. “In court, no one knows how the AI works.”

He added that although an AI-generated image might look more realistic, that doesn’t mean that it’s more reliable than a traditional human-drawn sketch.

The Goodyear Police Department isn’t the only local law enforcement agency to make headlines this year for its use of AI. In April, the Westbrook Police Department in Maine issued a public apology after it shared a photo of seized drugs that had been altered with AI.