The CIFAR Synthetic Evidence Corpus for Detecting AI-Generated Evidence

Abstract

The growing ability of generative models to produce realistic documents poses a direct challenge to evidentiary workflows in the justice system and the courts, where decisions increasingly depend on the authenticity of evidence such as receipts, communications, and administrative records. Unlike social media or academic settings, evidentiary documents are often only subtly altered, with small, localized edits that preserve overall plausibility while changing legal meaning. Yet progress on automated detection remains limited, largely due to the absence of suitable training and evaluation data especially suited for the justice system requirements. Existing resources are either focused on photos of human faces or natural scenery or on narrowly scoped academic or social media document types, and do not capture the structure, diversity, or manipulation patterns characteristic of real-world evidentiary data. As a result, current detection systems do not necessarily learn meaningful signals appropriate for the justice system. We introduce the CIFAR Synthetic Evidence Corpus, a dataset designed to enable rigorous evaluation of evidence verification under realistic and controlled conditions. The corpus spans multiple document families and a spectrum of manipulation strategies, from small field-level edits to complete document fabrication, and is constructed using a diverse set of state-of-the-art generative tools. It is organized to systematically vary both manipulation complexity and generation method, while enforcing source-level separation between training and test data to reflect real-world generalization challenges.