Digital Forensics Dispatch

The Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Forensics

April 25, 2023

A recent article, written by Swathi Kashettar of analyticsinsight.net, examines ChatGPT-4’s role in digital forensics. It is no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI), especially ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm.

In fact, Sensei’s principals have written copious articles and given presentations on AI. You can find those here. AI has been an extremely hot topic expected to change almost every profession, including digital forensics.

Kashettar foresees the use of ChatGPT4 as a means to increase productivity in digital forensics. It is no surprise to anyone in digital forensics that processing time is one of the biggest time eaters out there. Waiting for evidence to process can take hours to days depending on the amount of data being processed.

“Data analysis is one of ChatGPT-4’s main uses in digital forensics” writes Kashettar, who predicts that the data analysis process will be automated using AI. In some instances, there has been a use of AI in the analysis and identification processing of forensic tools for some time, but ChatGPT’s abilities have accelerated what digital forensics can do – and quickly

Some tools utilize a lower level AI to classify and categorize evidence such as image and video content. This categorization can include finding chats, firearms, people, money, etc.

While the uses of AI are many, there are some concerns, which Kashetter mentions. One of the key tenets of digital forensics is validation of evidence. Solely relying upon AI to sort, categorize, and find evidence will be a mistake.

Taking AI’s conclusion that there are incriminating messages on a cellphone or documents found on a computer would be very bad idea. Independently validating that those items of evidentiary value do exist on the system and that they are interpreted correctly is going to be key.

There have been numerous articles about the hallucinations of AI in the past few months. While AI is getting better as it learns, there’s still a concern that AI integration into forensic tools could possibly generate false artifacts when prompted to look for certain items.

While AI poses some exciting possibilities for digital forensic analysis, there are still many concerns about solely relying upon it. It will be interesting to see how forensic software and practices evolve with AI’s development in the future.

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