Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled
THIBODAUX, La. (AP) — The taunts were brutal. Nude images of a 13-year-old girl and her friends artificial intelligencewas making the rounds on social media and had become the talk of a Louisiana middle school.
The girls first sought help from the school’s guidance counselor and then from the deputy sheriff assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they are viewed, and adults were unable to find them. The director even had doubts about their existence.
The pictures were still spreading among the children. When the 13-year-old girl boarded the Lafourche County school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to her friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth-grader recalled at the disciplinary hearing.
Fed up, he attacked a boy on the bus and invited others to join him. He was expelled from Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. He said the boy he and his friends suspected of creating the images was not sent to the alternative school with him. Lawyers for the 13-year-old girl claim she has completely avoided school discipline.
When the sheriff’s department investigated the incident, it took the exact opposite actions. They blamed the two boys for sharing sexually explicit images, not the girl.
Louisiana episode highlights nightmarish potential Artificial intelligence deepfakes. They can and do disrupt children’s lives at school and at home. And as schools work to find solutions to this problem artificial intelligence in class instructionsthey have often done little to prepare for what new technology means in terms of cyberbullying and harassment.
Once again, adults are being left behind as children increasingly use new technologies to harm each other, said Sergio Alexander, a research fellow at Texas Christian University who focuses on emerging technology.
“When we ignore digital harm, the only time it becomes visible is when the victim finally breaks,” Alexander said.
In Lafourche County, the school district followed all protocols for reporting misconduct, Superintendent Jarod Martin said in a statement. He said he was presented with a “one-sided story” that failed to show the “totality and complex nature” of the case.
A girl’s nightmare begins with rumors
Hearing rumors about the nude images, the 13-year-old said she walked toward her guidance counselor with two friends — one of whom was nearly in tears — around 7 a.m. on Aug. 26. The Associated Press is not naming him because he is a minor and the AP does not normally name victims of sex crimes.
According to testimony at his school’s disciplinary hearing, he was there for moral support, initially not realizing he also had images of himself.
A weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, uncovered artificial intelligence-generated nude photos of eight female middle school students and two adults, the county and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.
The girl’s father, Joseph Daniels, described them as “completely nude with her face on them.”
Until recently, doing this required some technical skill. realistic deepfakes. Technology now makes it easy to grab a photo from social media, “nude” it, and create a viral nightmare for an unsuspecting classmate.
Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, said most schools are “putting their heads in the sand hoping it won’t happen.”
The Lafourche Parish School District was just beginning to develop policies on: artificial intelligence. According to documents provided through a records request, school-level AI guidance was mainly directed at academics. The district also had not updated its training on cyberbullying to reflect the threat posed by artificial intelligence-generated, sexually suggestive images. The curriculum their school used was from 2018.
School investigation hits hurdles
Although the girls at Sixth Ward Middle School had not seen the images firsthand, they had heard about them from the boys at school. Based on these conversations, the girls accused a classmate and two students from other schools of creating and disseminating nude photos on Snapchat and possibly TikTok.
Principal Danielle Coriell said the investigation that day remained inconclusive because no student claimed responsibility. According to records of the disciplinary hearing, the deputy assigned to the school searched for the images on social media but to no avail.
“I was led to believe it was just hearsay and hearsay,” the girl’s father said, describing his conversation with the school counselor that morning.
But the girl was distraught, and the police incident report showed that more girls reported being victims themselves. The 13-year-old boy returned to the counselor in the afternoon and asked him to call his father. He said he was rejected.
His father says he sent a text message that said “Dad” and said nothing else. They did not speak. The girl texted her sister, sarcastically and cruelly: “This is not being handled.”
When the school day ended, the principal was skeptical. At the disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney asked why the sheriff’s deputy did not check the phone of the boy the girls accused and why he was allowed to ride the same bus as the girl.
“Kids lie a lot,” Principal Coriell replied. “They lie about everything. They blow so many things out of proportion every day. They’ve been doing this all the time for 17 years. So, as far as I know, when I checked back at 2 a.m. there were no photos.”
A fight broke out on the school bus
When the girl got on the bus 15 minutes later, the boy was showing the images produced by the artificial intelligence to a friend. According to the girl, her friends’ fake nude pictures were backed up by a photo taken on the bus. At the school board meeting, principal Martin said a video from the school bus showed at least a half-dozen students passing out the footage.
“I was bullied and made fun of about my body all day,” the girl said at her hearing. He said his anger increased when he got on the bus.
Principal Coriell said he slapped the boy after seeing him and his phone. In one video, the boy is seen shrugging off the slap.
He hit her a second time. The manager then said the girl asked out loud: “Why am I the only one who does this?” The principal said two classmates hit the boy, then the 13-year-old boy climbed over a chair and punched and kicked him.
Video of the fight was posted on Facebook. “The hypersensitivity on social media was an act 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.
The girl had no disciplinary problems in the past, but was assigned to an alternative school due to the district relocation. fire him for a full term – 89 school days.
Weeks later, a child is charged
The first of the boys was on the day of the girl’s disciplinary hearing, three weeks after the fight.
The student was charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of AI-generated images under a new Louisiana state law that is part of a wave of such legislation across the country. A second juvenile was charged with the same charges in December, the sheriff’s department said. Neither of them could be identified by authorities due to their age.
The girl will not be charged due to 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 lawyers about what type of school discipline the boy would face.
The district said in a statement that federal student privacy laws prohibit discussion of individual students’ disciplinary records. The girl’s attorney, Gregory Miller, said he was not aware of any school discipline against the classmate accused of sharing the images.
Ultimately, the board expelled the 13-year-old boy. He cried, his father said.
“She felt victimized multiple times by the photos and the school not believing her, putting her on a bus, and then expelling her,” she said in an interview.
Fallout throws a student off course
Her father said the girl started skipping meals after she was sent to the alternative school. Unable to concentrate, he did not complete any of the school’s online work for several days before his father placed him in treatment for depression and anxiety.
His father said that no one noticed at first when he stopped doing his homework.
“It’s kind of been left behind,” he said.
His lawyers appealed to the school board and another hearing was scheduled for seven weeks.
So much time had passed by then that he could return to his old school on parole. But because he missed homework before being treated for depression, the district required him to stay at an alternative facility for another 12 weeks.
For students who are suspended or expelled from school, the impact can last for years. There is a high probability that they will be suspended again. They are becoming disconnected from their classmates and are more likely to become so. left school. They are more likely to be lower notes and lower graduation rates.
“She’s already dropped out enough,” Matt Ory, one of the girl’s attorneys, told the board Nov. 5. “He is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Inspector Martin disagreed: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
But the board was shaken. Henry Lafont, one of the members, said: “There are a lot of things I don’t like about this video. But I’m also trying to put into perspective what he was going through all day.” They allowed him to return to campus immediately. His first day back at school was Nov. 7, but he will remain on probation until Jan. 29.
This means there will be no dancing, sports and extracurricular activities. His father said he had already missed the basketball tryouts, meaning he couldn’t play this season. He finds the situation “heartbreaking.”
“I was hoping that he would make great friends, that they would go to high school together and that it would keep everyone out of trouble and on the right track,” his father said. “I think they ruined it.”
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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.
