Experts in artificial intelligence and data ethics said they felt: edmonton policerecently used AI to create a photo of an unidentified deceased woman, which raises several questions.
“I think this is complicated, but we’re trying to think about it in a very holistic way,” CEO Katrina Ingram said. Ethically aligned AIis an Edmonton company that helps organizations and individuals build and deploy ethical AI solutions.
As the use of AI becomes more common in all industries and fields, including law enforcement, there is a growing debate about the ethics of how these tools are applied.
Edmonton Police say a woman’s body was found in a dumpster in downtown Edmonton in late December 2024. Police released stock images of the woman, a sketch of her tattoo, and a jacket and boots in March 2025 to confirm her identity. Then, in November, EPS used AI to create “an image that closely resembles the deceased woman” in hopes of yielding clues about the woman’s identity.
Ingram said there are ethical questions about how AI tools are built and function because of the data they obtain to generate images and other content. “Should we be using these tools? And there are some questions even about the legality of the data that was taken to build these tools, and that’s really starting to raise questions for law enforcement, because as a law enforcement agency, you shouldn’t be using tools that are created illegally,” Ingram said.
Police spokeswoman Cheryl Foldenhout told Taproot that EPS does not release operational details, such as the specific software used by police. He said the digital forensics team uses AI models captured in a secure EPS platform where no data is sent externally, and the source code is publicly accessible, fully transparent and can be used legally.
Ingram said she believes this particular case is ethical because police had a motive to try to identify the deceased, even though traditional sketches provided no answers. “They turned to AI in hopes that a more realistic version might be helpful,” she says. “The context is important in terms of what they did.” Additionally, Ingram said EPS members will be able to confirm whether the AI-generated photos actually resemble the person who died.
But Ingram contrasted the ethics of this case with a 2022 case in which EPS used DNA found at a crime scene to create a rough image of a suspect in an unsolved sexual assault. Ingram used this example when giving a talk related to AI and racial bias.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims criticized the images published by EPS as racist, saying they created an “ambiguous portrait” and “a generic image of a black man,” a statement said at the time. “The absurdity of publicly displaying a portrait of a hypothetical racist suspect in the hope that such tactics could lead to general alarm and perhaps an arrest cannot be overstated,” the statement said. “In effect, the public is being asked to ‘watch out’ for people of a certain race, and other physical characteristics (such as height) are also thrown in as a range. This is racial profiling backed by imperfect science.” EPS later apologized for publishing the 2022 photo.
Foldenhout said if police run out of traditional investigative methods, they may use technologically enhanced images of a dead person to describe the person. EPS consulted with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and a forensic anthropologist before facial recognition experts in the Digital Forensics Division created the AI-generated images. Mr Foldenhout said neither the original photo nor the police sketch of the deceased woman had been uploaded to the AI image generator. Instead, the image was created by repeating the prompts until it resembled the woman as accurately as possible.
