THIBODAUX, La. (AP) — The teasing was relentless. AI-generated nude images of a 13-year-old girl and her friends circulated on social media and became the talk of a middle school in Louisiana.
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 were viewed, and adults couldn’t find them. The director doubted it even existed.
Among the children, the images were still spreading. When the 13-year-old got on 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 upset,” the eighth-grader recalled at her disciplinary hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. He was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy she and her friends suspected had created the images was not sent to that alternative school with her. Lawyers for the 13-year-old girl say she avoided school discipline.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took reverse action. They charged two of the boys who had been accused of sharing explicit images – and not the girl.
The Louisiana episode highlights the nightmarish potential of AI deepfakes. They can, and do, change children’s lives – at school and at home. And while schools are working to address artificial intelligence in classroom teaching, they’ve often done little to prepare for what the new technology means for bullying and cyberbullying.
Once again, as kids increasingly use new technologies to hurt each other, adults are behind the curve, said Sergio Alexander, a research associate at Texas Christian University focused on emerging technology.
“When we ignore digital harm, the only time it becomes noticeable is when the victim finally breaks,” Alexander said.
In Lafourche Parish, the school district followed all of its protocols for reporting misconduct, Superintendent Jarod Martin said in a statement. He said a “one-sided story” of the case had been presented that failed to illustrate its “wholeness and complex nature”.
A girl’s nightmare starts with rumours
After hearing rumors about the nude images, the 13-year-old said she marched with two friends – one almost in tears – to the councilor around 7am on August 26. The Associated Press is not naming her because she is a minor and because the AP does not normally name victims of sex crimes.
She was there for moral support, not realizing at first that there were also pictures of her, according to testimony at the school’s disciplinary hearing.
Ultimately, the weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, turned up AI-generated nude images of eight middle school girls and two adults, the district and the sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.
“Full nudes with the face on them” is how the girl’s father, Joseph Daniels, described them.
Until recently, it took some technical skills to make realistic deepfakes. Technology now makes it easy to pull a photo off social media, “nudify” it, and create a viral nightmare for an unsuspecting classmate.
Most schools “are kind of burying their heads in the sand, hoping this doesn’t happen,” said Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University.
The Lafourche Parish School District was just beginning to develop AI policies. AI guidance at the school level was primarily aimed at academics, according to documents provided in a records request. The district also failed to update its cyberbullying training to reflect the threat of AI-generated sexually explicit images. The curriculum used by his schools was from 2018.
A school investigation hits obstacles
Although the girls at Sixth Ward Middle School had not seen the images firsthand, they had heard about them from boys at the school. Based on those conversations, the girls accused a classmate and two students from other schools of creating and spreading nudes on Snapchat and possibly TikTok.
Principal Danielle Coriell said an investigation went cold that day because no student claimed responsibility. The deputy assigned to the school searched for the images on social media without success, according to a recording of the disciplinary hearing.
“I was led to believe that these were just hearsay and rumors,” the girl’s father said, recounting a conversation he had that morning with the school counselor.
But the girl was unhappy, and a police incident report showed that several girls reported being victims as well. The 13-year-old returned to the counselor in the afternoon, asking to call her father. She said she was turned down.
Her father says she sent a text that said “Dad” and nothing else. They didn’t speak. With relentless taunting, the girl texted her sister, “Nothing can be solved.”
As the school day ended, the principal was skeptical. At the disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney asked why the sheriff’s deputy didn’t check the phone of the boy the girls are accusing and why he was allowed to get on the same bus as the girl.
“Kids lie a lot,” replied Coriell, the principal. “They lie about all kinds of things. They blow a lot of things out of proportion every day. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So as far as I know, at 2 o’clock when I checked again, there were no pictures.”
A fight breaks out on the school bus
When the girl boarded the bus 15 minutes later, the boy was showing the AI-generated images to a friend. Fake nude pictures of her friends were visible on the boy’s phone, the girl said, a claim supported by a photo taken on the bus. A school bus video showed at least a half-dozen students circulating the footage, Martin, the superintendent, said at a school board meeting.
“I went to get bullied and made fun of my body all day,” the girl told the hearing. When she got on the bus, she said, the anger was building.
After seeing the boy and his phone, she slapped him, said Coriell, the principal. The boy shrugged off the slap, a video shows.
He hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked out loud, “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a chair, punched and stomped on it.
Video of the fight was posted on Facebook. “The overwhelming sentiment on social media 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 their joint statement released in November.
The girl had no past disciplinary problems, but was assigned to an alternative school as the district moved to expel her for an entire semester — 89 school days.
Weeks later, a boy is accused
On the day of the girl’s disciplinary hearing, three weeks after the fight, the first of the boys was put on trial.
The student was charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of images created by artificial intelligence under a new Louisiana state law, part of a wave of such legislation across the country. A second boy was charged in December with identical charges, the sheriff’s department said. Neither has been identified by authorities because of their ages.
The girl will not be charged because of what the sheriff’s office described as “the totality of the circumstances.”
At the disciplinary hearing, the principal refused to answer questions from the girl’s attorneys about what kind of school discipline the boy would face.
The district said in a statement that federal student privacy laws prohibit it from discussing individual students’ disciplinary records. Gregory Miller, an attorney for the girl, said he had no knowledge of any school discipline for the classmate accused of sharing the images.
In the end, the commission expelled the 13-year-old. She cried, her father said.
“She felt like she was victimized multiple times — by the images and the fact that the school didn’t believe her and they put her on a bus and then expelled her for her actions,” he said in an interview.
Consequences cause a student to drop out of the course
After being sent to the alternative school, the girl started skipping meals, her father said. Unable to focus, she didn’t complete any of her online schoolwork for several days before her father got her into therapy for depression and anxiety.
No one initially noticed when she stopped doing her chores, her father said.
“She was kind of left behind,” he said.
Her lawyers appealed to the school board, and another hearing was scheduled for seven weeks later.
By then, so much time had passed that she could have returned to her old school on probation. But because she had missed assignments before being treated for depression, the district wanted her to stay at the alternate site for another 12 weeks.
For students who are suspended or expelled, the impact can last for years. They are more likely to be suspended again. They become disconnected from their classmates and are more likely to become disconnected from school. They are more likely to have lower grades and lower graduation rates.
“She’s already been out quite a bit at school,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board Nov. 5. “She is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Martin, the superintendent, retorted, “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
But the board was rocking. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are a lot of things in that video that I don’t like. But I’m also trying to put into perspective what she went through all day.” They allowed him to return to campus immediately. Her first day back at school was November 7th, although she will remain on probation until January 29th.
That means no dancing, no sports, and no extracurricular activities. She has already missed basketball tryouts, meaning she won’t be able to play this season, her father said. He finds the situation “heartbreaking”.
“I was hoping she’d make great friends, go to high school together and, you know, keep everybody out of trouble down the road,” her father said. “I think they ruined that.”
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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.