Abductive Corroboration of Probabilistic AI Models for Forensic Synthetic Media Detection
Junade Ali
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, at their core, apply general learnings from broad datasets to individual circumstances using probabilistic behaviour. This inductive approach stands in contrast to deductive reasoning approaches which seek to prove conclusions from their premises. However, research has shown that deductive reasoning with AI models is a challenging problem and in the real-world it may not always be feasible. An alternative way forward is to leverage abductive reasoning, seeking to corroborate the output of multiple approaches to identify the most likely conclusion from the factual matrix. We apply this to synthetic media detection in forensic settings, and find we are able to disproportionately lower the risk of false positives to true positive recall. We also provide the first empirical evaluation of OpenAI's rollout of SynthID on synthetic images and evaluate how complementary different synthetic media detection approaches are.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.