Girls suing the school argued that at least 59 girls were traumatized by “an extended, catastrophic institutional failure.” They claimed that they “were forced to go to high school while ‘deepfake’ nude images of them were circulating within the school community,” and that appallingly, Lindsay Deibler-Wallace, assistant head of Upper School, took no action to protect them after telling parents that “boys will be boys.”
The victims alleged that the school never suspended the students even after “the LCDS upper school was in a state of acute panic and disruption related to the AI-generated images.” Instead, the school allegedly discouraged girls from going to police, while withholding information from parents and obstructing efforts to investigate the distribution of AI-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM), such as by refusing to respond to detectives seeking a yearbook photo for comparison.
Two male students have since pleaded guilty to 59 felony counts of sexual abuse of children, and their victims are hoping the court will rule that LCDS was required to report the incident to police, both by law and by “reasonable institutional practice.”
Especially if it is happening outside school grounds, at non-school times, using non-school devices.
If the kids are showing each-other these nudes while they’re at school, that’s another matter. But, it sounds like it was all happening outside school.
If they knew it was happening it sounds like something they should have told the parents. But, they found out about it via the police, so really it seems like if there was a criminal matter, it should be the police who are informing the parents.
Also, I’m uncomfortable with the concept of AI nudes being treated as equivalent to actual nudes. The GenAI system has no idea what someone looks like nude, all it can do it create something plausible. If they were using these nudes to harass the girls, that would be one thing. But, according to the article, the girls didn’t know it was happening.
Can it really be sexual abuse if the person who was abused was never touched, never threatened, and if they never found out that anything had happened? What if the kids had just been drawing their classmates nude (something that has probably been happening for centuries)?
If I make an AI nude of Trump shitting himself and pass it to my buddies, am I sexually abusing Trump? Should I go to jail for that?
The school knew and chose not to report to the police because they believed that there were no laws around the legality of AI CSAM. The school officials are not lawyers. They should have reported to the police regardless of what they believed.
The laws may or may not have caught up to AI abuse images yet, but that doesn’t make them innocent images. These girls felt violated. It was their likeness used to create CSAM.