Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. She was the one expelled

THIBODAUX, Louisiana — The teasing was incessant. Nude images of a 13-year-old girl and her friends, generated by artificial intelligence, circulated on social networks and became the talk of a Louisiana college.

The girls sought help, first from a school guidance counselor, then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages within seconds of viewing them, and adults were unable to find them. The director even doubted their existence.

Among the children, the images continued to circulate. When the 13-year-old girl boarded the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one to a friend.

“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth-grader recalled during her disciplinary hearing.

Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting the others to join her. She 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 of creating the images was not sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old’s lawyers say he avoided school discipline altogether.

When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite action. They charged two of the boys accused of sharing explicit images – not the girl.

The Louisiana episode highlights the nightmarish potential of AI deepfakes. They can and do disrupt children’s lives, both at school and at home. And even as schools work to integrate artificial intelligence into classroom teaching, they often haven’t done much to prepare for the consequences of these new technologies when it comes to cyberbullying and harassment.

Once again, as children increasingly use new technologies to harm themselves, adults are lagging behind, said Sergio Alexander, a research associate at Texas Christian University who specializes in emerging technologies.

“When we ignore digital harm, the only moment that becomes visible 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” had been presented about the case, which failed to illustrate its “totality and complex nature”.

After hearing rumors about the nude images, the 13-year-old said she walked with two friends – one almost in tears – to the guidance counselor around 7 a.m. on August 26. The Associated Press is not naming her because she is a minor and because AP does not normally name victims of sex crimes.

She was there for moral support, not initially realizing that there were also images of her, according to testimony at her school’s disciplinary hearing.

Ultimately, the weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, revealed nude AI-generated images of eight middle school girls and two adults, the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.

“Complete nudes with her face on them,” is how the girl’s father, Joseph Daniels, described them.

Until recently, it required technical skills to make realistic deepfakes. Technology now makes it easy to take a photo on social media, “nudify” it, and create a viral nightmare for an unsuspecting classmate.

Most schools are “just burying their heads in the sand, hoping 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 was just beginning to develop policies on artificial intelligence. Guidance on school-level AI was aimed primarily at academics, according to documents provided through a records request. The district also had not updated its cyberbullying training to reflect the threat of AI-generated sexually explicit images. The curriculum used by its schools dated from 2018.

Although the girls at Sixth Ward Middle School hadn’t seen the footage themselves, they heard about it from the boys at the school. Based on these conversations, the girls accused a classmate and two students from other schools of creating and distributing nudes on Snapchat and eventually TikTok.

Principal Danielle Coriell said an investigation took place that day with no students taking 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 it was 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 more girls were reporting they were victims too. The 13-year-old girl returned to the counselor in the afternoon and asked to call her father. She said she was turned down.

Her father says she sent a text message saying “Daddy” and nothing else. They didn’t speak. With incessant teasing, the young girl sent a text message to her sister: “This cannot be handled. »

As the school day drew to a close, the principal was skeptical. At the disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney questioned why the sheriff’s deputy didn’t check the phone of the boy the girls accused and why he was allowed to board the same bus as the girl.

“Kids lie a lot,” replied Coriell, the principal. “They lie about all kinds of things. They exaggerate a lot of things on a daily basis. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So to my knowledge, at 2 p.m., when I checked again, there were no photos.”

When the girl got on the bus 15 minutes later, the boy was showing the AI-generated images to a friend. Fake nude images of her friends were visible on the boy’s phone, the girl said, a claim supported by a photo taken on the bus. Video from the school bus showed at least a half-dozen students passing around the images, Martin, the superintendent, said at a school board meeting.

“I spent the whole day being bullied and made fun of for my body,” the young girl said during her hearing. When she boarded the bus, she said, anger was building.

After seeing the boy and his phone, she slapped him, said Coriell, the principal. The boy ignored the slap, video shows.

She 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 onto a seat, punched and stomped on him.

Video of the fight was posted on Facebook. “The prevailing sentiment on social media was one of outrage and demands 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 disciplinary problems in the past, but she was assigned to an alternative school when the district decided to expel her for a full semester, or 89 school days.

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 illegally disseminating 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 indicted in December on identical charges, the sheriff’s department said. Neither have been identified by authorities because of their age.

The girl will 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 attorneys about what type 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, the girl’s attorney, said he was not aware of any school discipline against the classmate accused of sharing the images.

Ultimately, the committee expelled the 13-year-old. She cried, her father said.

“She just felt like she had been victimized repeatedly — because of the photos and the fact that the school didn’t believe her and they put her on a bus and then kicked her out for her actions,” he said in an interview.

After being sent to an alternative school, the girl began skipping meals, her father said. Unable to concentrate, she did no online work at school for several days before her father put her in therapy for depression and anxiety.

At first, no one noticed that she had stopped doing her homework, her father said.

“She was kind of left behind,” he said.

His lawyers appealed to the school board and another hearing was scheduled 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 her assignments before being treated for depression, the district wanted her to stay at the alternate site for another 12 weeks.

For suspended or expelled students, the impact can last for years. They are more likely to be suspended again. They disconnect from their classmates and are more likely to disengage from school. They are more likely to have lower grades and lower graduation rates.

“She’s already left school enough,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the school 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 of directors was influenced. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are a lot of things in this 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 7, although she will remain on probation until January 29.

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 that she would make good friends, that they would go to high school together and that, you know, it would keep everyone out of trouble on track,” her father said. “I think they blew it.”

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.