A teenage girl in Louisiana confronted a boy who was sharing artificial intelligence-generated nude photos on a school bus — and she was the one who was expelled after the fight.
The 13-year-old heard rumors of the nude images and went with two friends to meet with the guidance counselor at their school in Thibodaux in August. They accused a classmate and two students from other schools of creating and circulating the AI-generated images on Snapchat and possibly TikTok, reported the Associated Press.
“Full nudes with her face put on them,” said the girl’s father, Joseph Daniels.
Technology has advanced far beyond most schools’ cyberbullying policies because realistic deepfakes can be created by pulling photos off social media and using AI to “nudify” the image, which creates a nightmare for the students who are targeted.
“When we ignore the digital harm, the only moment that becomes visible is when the victim finally breaks,” said Sergio Alexander, a researcher at Texas Christian University focused on emerging technology.
The images had been spread on Snapchat, which deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, so school officials and a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school couldn’t find them, and the principal doubted their existence.
“Kids lie a lot,” said Danielle Coriell, principal at Sixth Ward Middle School. “They lie about all kinds of things. They blow lots of things out of proportion on a daily basis. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So to my knowledge, at 2 o’clock when I checked again, there were no pictures.”
The girl’s father said he “was led to believe that this was just hearsay and rumors,” but the girl was miserable for the rest of the day and went to the counselor in the afternoon asking to call her father, but she was not allowed, and when she stepped onto the school bus that afternoon, she saw a classmate showing one of the nude images to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader said.
She slapped the boy, who video shows shrugging off the smack, and then hit him a second time, saying, “Why am I the only one doing this?”
Two classmates then hit the boy before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat and punched and stomped the boy, and video of the altercation was posted on Facebook.
“Overwhelming social media sentiment was one of outrage and a demand that the students involved in the fight be held accountable,” the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement released in November.
Although the girl had no disciplinary record, she was assigned to an alternative school as the district looked to expel her for a full semester, and the principal refused to answer questions at her disciplinary hearing about what punishment the boy would face.
“She just felt like she was victimized multiple times — by the pictures and by the school not believing her and by them putting her on a bus and then expelling her for her actions,” her father said.
But on the day of that hearing, three weeks after the fight, the boy was charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of images created by artificial intelligence under a new Louisiana state law, and a second boy was hit this month with identical charges, but the sheriff’s office declined to charge the girl in the fight due to the “totality of the circumstances.”
The girl has gone into therapy for depression and anxiety while attending the alternative school, where her father said she started skipping meals and stopped completing assignments, and Sixth Ward Middle School wants her to remain at the alternative school for another 12 weeks due to that missed work.
“Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators,” said Superintendent Jarod Martin.
The girl’s attorneys pleaded her case before the school board early last month, and they allowed her to return immediately, although she’ll remain on probation until Jan. 29 – which her father said would prevent her from taking part in sports, extracurricular activities and dances.
“I was hoping she would make great friends, they would go to the high school together and, you know, it’d keep everybody out of trouble on the right tracks,” her father said. “I think they ruined that.”
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