THIBODAUX, La. (AP) — The teasing was relentless. Nude images of a 13-year-old girl and her friends, generated by artificial intelligence, were circulating on social media and had become the talk of a Louisiana middle school.
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who’d been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
The Louisiana episode highlights the nightmarish potential of AI deepfakes. They can, and do, upend children’s lives — at school, and at home. And while schools are working to …
The people in charge worry about adults when it is the minors who are doing it more and doing it to themselves. Yet, the minors aren’t allegedly smart enough to do anything remotely crazy like this according to people who feel they are smarter than reality. Minors can outsmart adults any day of the week if they want. Parents and others just need to realize it.
I wonder how that boy would feel if she made a deep fake of him with a tiny mushroom.
Those kids may view this as a prank, but the consequences of producing and/or possessing such images are not funny. If schools don’t educate students about this, then parents need to. “The talk” has become much more complicated in the age of AI.