Jurisvision of Deepfake Financial Documents: Semiotic Disruption and Remediation in Post-textual Evidence

Abstract

Abstract AI-generated forgeries of financial documents—such as invoices, audit reports, ledgers, and balance sheets—expose a critical fault line in legal proof. These hybrid visual–textual artefacts derive evidentiary authority from their jurisvisual form: logos, seals, signatures, and tabular architecture, whose visual grammar indexes authenticity and institutional power. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics (representamen–object–interpretant), this study demonstrates that deepfake technologies dissolve the sign-relation underwriting documentary proof by engineering synthetic representamina that mimic the indexical and symbolic features of authentic documents. At the same time, the underlying financial event may be absent. The evidentiary economy is thereby reconfigured within a videosphere where image-like documents perform the truth. This article advances a layered remediation architecture: (i) provenance anchoring through cryptographic signatures, content hashing, and distributed ledgers; (ii) content forensics integrating AI-assisted detection with forensic semiotics—indexical stress tests and symbolic authenticity challenges; and (iii) procedural safeguards including calibrated evidentiary thresholds, adversarial authenticity hearings, and robust chain-of-custody protocols. It argues that restoring evidentiary confidence requires cultivating semiotic literacy among judges, auditors, and legal practitioners as core professional competence, enabling legal systems to navigate the post-textual landscape with epistemic rigour.