What is the epistemic principle behind the fact that a digital photo is considered more reliable evidence of an event than a drawing by a human?

Question

In court or in a police investigation, a digital photo is considered as solid evidence of an event having occurred, but a drawing by a person who has witnessed the event wouldn't be taken as seriously.

Yet from an information point of view, both processes are similar:

• An image of the event was captured by the system (the camera lens, the witness's eyes).
• This image was converted (camera: into 0 & 1s, witness: into neural signals) and than stored in the system (the camera's digital memory, witness's brain).
• The image was later retrieved from storage and reproduced (camera: printed or displayed on a monitor, witness: doing the drawing themselves or using a forensic artist).

The processes are similar in principle, the only difference is the degree of accuracy, i.e. it is a quantitative difference. Yet they are considered to be entirely different qualities of evidence: The witness's reliability (even assuming good intentions) will be questioned and disputed by any prosecutor or lawyer. The digital photos will not be disputed in most cases, and would require an image processing specialist if they wanted to make the claim that it was digitally tampered with or photoshopped or something.

1. Am I correct that this an epistemic question? Why is a digital photo considered more reliable than a human drawing?
2. Does this have any implications for AI? We hear strong AI is impossible, computers can never do what a human does, blah, blah, but here we are trusting a very primitive computer (that's what a digital camera is) to be a much more reliable witness than a human.

Answer 1

I suppose this could be filed as an epistemic question, but has other implications as well.

We certainly know that digital photos can be readily manipulated and that photos, such as Mathew Brady's "evidential" images, can be manipulatively staged. And we also use charts, graphs, police drawings, crime scene drawings, statistics, handwriting samples, recordings, models (as in Wittgenstein's example), and, above all, eyewitness testimony or "memory," which is generally considered the most reliable evidence.

The reason we may accept a digital photo as evidence is rather straightforward, but instead of confirming your second point, actually tends to refute it. The machine process is assumed to be a fundamentally physical-mechanical process with a linear causality and without the intervention of "subjectivity." Its product is objective or intersubjectively stable. That is, without the intermediation of a subject with freedom, values, choices, and all sort of possibilities for lying, deception, misrepresentation, moods, fears, greed, forgetfulness, or other "inaccurate" data transfers, including typically poor drawing skills.

The machine is simply "dumb" matter carrying out a predictable, "lawful" input-output transaction without the "ghostly," black-box operations of consciousness and memory. Machines don't lie. At least not without a human accomplice who "programs" or otherwise distorts their causal sequences. It is not the superior cognitive abilities, but precisely the inabilities of the machine that make it a "reliable" witness.

Answer 2

The question you raise has indeed an epistemic facet, and it could be break down to sub-questions: (1) What is the epistemic status of human-produced evidence (the drawing)? (2) What is the epistemic status of machine-produced evidence (the photo)? And then: (3) Of the two alternatives - why the first is taken to be in some circumstances less reliable than the second?

The premise accompany this question, if I understood you right, is that the two products are generated via similar processes yielding merely differences that amount to accuracy.

My conjecture is that the reason for taking the second as more reliable arouses from a desire to avoid error as much as possible - lack of accuracy could make us for example send some innocent person to jail. This desire can better be fulfilled when acknowledging that unlike humans, machines are not inherently biased, nor experience optical illusions, nor being distracted and so on. A machine-produced evidence thereby is preferable to a human-produced evidence when matters of trial and making-justice are at stake.

Contextual Note: from philosophical-historical point of view, during the 19th century intellectual world experienced epistemic-crisis in virtue of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries which brought about the possibility that human's intuition cannot serve for matters scientific and cannot be trusted. It was thought before, that Euclidean geometry describes the space, and once having other consistent alternative geometries the question as to which geometry describes the space brought confusion. Furthermore, even before the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the gradual abandonment of religion and the secularization of societies, left humans with no epistemic-authority (God) and brought necessity to find trustworthy methods - mechanical methods or procedures evolved, and have been since preferable in light of the search for objectivity.