AI allows crash victims to add extra damage on photos

To combat this threat, FleetCheck has outlined a simple solution for truck and van drivers that should avoid them being caught out.

Neil Avent, chief technical officer at the fleet software company, said recent advances in the realism of both still and digital AI-generated images were driving new challenges for fleets and insurers.

He said: “There has been a real step change in the last few months with the more widespread availability of a technology called GANs – or generative adversarial networks. This uses two neural networks in competition to create images and is now being offered by the mainstream image generation systems, replacing previous diffusion-style techniques.

“The result is that there has been a jump in the quality of video and image generation. If you take an image of a vehicle that has been involved in an accident and asked AI to ‘add scratches and light dents along the door panel’ today, then the output is much more convincing than it was even last year.”

The biggest potential for fraud lies in instances where an accident has occurred and AI is used to exaggerate the level of damage that had resulted.

“If an employee is involved in a collision, the driver of the other vehicle may take pictures of the damage incurred and ask AI to make it worse to increase the value of the claim. One of the advantages of GANs technology is that it can do this across multiple images with a high degree of consistency,” Avent explained.

And while AI images and video are probably not sufficiently convincing at the moment, the tipping point is likely to be only a matter of months away, based on the current rate of progress – with a resulting impact on fleet insurance costs.

FleetCheck said businesses can tackle this by simply asking drivers who are involved in collisions to take pictures of all the vehicles involved, ensuring that a complete record of the accident is created and later use of AI can be much more easily identified.

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