An employment lawyer on the new complications facing workplace misconduct investigations, and what protects employers
Fabricated stories are nothing new in workplace investigations. But AI and deepfake technology are giving employees a more convincing way to back them up, according to Tracey Diamond, a labor and employment partner at Troutman Pepper Locke in Philadelphia.
"It's sort of like a continuation of the old version of employees lying. They're just creating evidence to further their lies," Diamond said.
"We're not seeing it a lot yet, but I do think that the possibilities are becoming more real because AI is getting more and more accurate. And the ability to create falsified documents, falsified time records, falsified pictures, it's just becoming harder to detect."
Diamond has already encountered the problem firsthand. "I did have a situation with a workplace investigation not that long ago where there were falsified communications made," she said. "I don't know whether the person used AI to create that, but he'd used something."
The detection challenge she describes is backed by recent research. When identity verification firm iProov tested 2,000 U.S. and U.K. consumers in 2025, only 0.1% correctly identified every real and fake image and video sample, even after being told to look for fakes. And the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged approximately $893 million in AI-enabled fraud losses in 2025, the first year the agency tracked AI as its own category....
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