THIBODOUX, La. (AP) — The teasing was relentless. Nude photos of a 13-year-old girl and her friends created by artificial intelligence went viral on social media and became the talk of a middle school in Louisiana.
The girls pleaded for help, first with a school guidance counselor and then with a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after being viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal also doubted their existence.
Among the children, the images were still circulating. When the 13-year-old girl boarded the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was pointing out a friend among them.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth-grader recalled at her disciplinary hearing.
Fed up, she assaulted a boy on the bus by inviting him to join her. He was pulled from the sixth ward middle school for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy she and her friends suspected of creating the images was not sent to an alternative school with her. Lawyers for the 13-year-old girl alleged that she completely ignored school discipline.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite action. They accused the two boys who were accused of sharing the explicit photos – and not the girl.
The Louisiana episode highlights the dire potential of AI deepfakes. They can, and do, elevate children’s lives at school and at home. And while schools are working to address artificial intelligence in classroom instruction, they have done little to prepare for what the new technology means for cyberbullying and harassment.
Once again, as children increasingly use new technology to hurt each other, adults are behind the curve, said Sergio Alexander, a research associate at Texas Christian University who focused on the emerging technology.
“When we ignore digital harm, the only moment seen is when the victim finally breaks,” Alexander said.
In Lafourche Parish, the school district followed all protocols for reporting abuse, Superintendent Jarrod Martin said in a statement. He said a “one-sided narrative” of the case had been presented that failed to portray its “completeness and complex nature”.
A girl’s nightmare begins with a rumour
After hearing rumors about the nude photos, the 13-year-old said she and two friends — one in tears — marched with a guidance counselor around 7 a.m. on Aug. 26.
She was there for moral support, not realizing at first that the photos were of her, according to testimony at her school’s disciplinary hearing.
Ultimately, a weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, uncovered AI-generated nude images of eight female middle school students and two adults, the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.
As the girl’s father, Joseph Daniels, described them, “full nudity was placed on her face”.
Until recently, it took some technical skill to make realistic deepfakes. Technology now makes it easy to pull a photo from social media, “nude” it, and create a viral nightmare for unsuspecting classmates.
Most schools “bury their heads in the sand and hope it 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 recently began developing policies on artificial intelligence. The school-level AI guidance was primarily addressed to academics, according to documents provided through a records request. The district had not updated its training on cyberbullying to reflect the dangers of AI-generated, sexually explicit images. The curriculum used by its schools was from 2018.
A school research hits obstacles
Although the Sixth Ward Middle School girls had not seen the photos themselves, they had heard about them from boys at school. Based on those conversations, the girls accused a classmate and two students from another school of creating and circulating nudes on Snapchat and possibly TikTok.
The principal, Daniel Coryell, said the investigation went cold after no student claimed responsibility that day. According to a recording of the disciplinary hearing, a deputy assigned to the school unsuccessfully searched social media for the photos.
“I was led to believe it was just hearsay and rumour,” the girl’s father said, recounting a conversation he had with a school counselor that morning.
But the girl was miserable, and police incident reports showed that many girls were also reporting being victimized. The 13-year-old returned to the counselor in the afternoon and asked to call her father. She said it was rejected.
His father says he sent a text message saying “Dad” and nothing else. They didn’t speak. Jokingly, the girl texted her sister, “Can’t handle it.”
After the school day, the principal became suspicious. At the disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney asked why the sheriff’s deputy didn’t check the phone of the boy the girl accused and why the girl was allowed to ride the same bus.
“Kids lie a lot,” replied Principal Correll. “They lie about all kinds of things. They blow a lot of things out of proportion on a daily basis. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So to my knowledge, when I checked again at 2 o’clock, there were no pictures.”
A fight breaks out on the school bus
15 minutes later, the boy was showing the AI-generated photos to his friend after the girl boarded the bus. Fake nude photos of her friends appeared on the boy’s phone, the girl said, a claim backed up by the photo taken on the bus. A video from the school bus showed at least half a dozen students transmitting the images, Martin, the superintendent, said at the school board meeting.
“I spent the whole day being teased and teased about my body,” said the girl as she listened. When she got on the bus, she said, the anger was rising.
After seeing the boy and his phone, he slapped her, Principal Correll said. The boy was slapped, the video shows.
He hit her 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 into a seat and punched and stabbed him.
A video of the fight was posted on Facebook. “The overwhelming social media sentiment was an outrage and a demand to hold the students involved in the fight accountable,” the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement in November.
The girl had no past disciplinary problems, but was assigned to an alternative school because the district expelled her for a full semester – 89 school days.
Weeks later, a boy is charged
It was on the day of the girl’s disciplinary hearing, three weeks after the fight, that the first of the boys was charged.
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 laws across the country. A second boy was charged similarly in December, the Sheriff’s Department said. Neither did authorities identify them because of their ages.
The girl did not face any charges 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 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 school discipline for a classmate accused of sharing the photos.
Ultimately, the panel expelled the 13-year-old. She cried, her father said.
“She just realized she’s been victimized so many times — the pictures and the school not believing her and them putting her on the bus and then expelling her for her actions,” he said in an interview.
The result is sending the student out of the course
After she was sent to an alternative school, the girl started skipping meals, her father said. Unable to concentrate, she didn’t complete any online schoolwork for several days, before her father brought her into therapy for depression and anxiety.
No one noticed at first when he stopped doing his assignments, his father said.
“She was kind of left behind,” he said.
His lawyers appealed to the school board, and another hearing was scheduled for seven weeks later.
By then, so much time had passed that he could return to his old school on probation. But because he missed assignments before being treated for depression, the district wanted him to stay at an 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 are disengaged from their classmates, and they are more likely to disengage from school. They are more likely to have lower grades and lower graduation rates.
“She’s already out of school,” Matt Ory, one of the girl’s attorneys, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Martin, the superintendent, replied: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
But the board refused. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are a lot of things in that video that I don’t like. But I’m trying to put into perspective what he goes through all day.” They allowed him to return to campus immediately. Her first day at school was Nov. 7, although she will remain on probation until Jan. 29.
This 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 that he would make good friends, that they would go to high school together and, you know, that would keep everybody out of trouble, on the right track,” his father said. “I think they wasted that.”
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Reported from Hollingsworth Mission, Kansas.
