Teens Are Using AI-Fueled ‘Slander Pages’ to Mock Their Teachers

The video opens with a school principal lip-syncing a love song, but he’s not the only performer.

AI-generated versions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein join him in the ballad — a cross between Will Joseph Cook’s “Be Around Me” and a rewrite of Beth McCarthy’s song on TikTok — with Epstein uttering the words: “Oh my God, did he call her baby, maybe?”

The clip, posted on the Instagram account @thewyliefiles, has been liked more than 107,000 times. His caption reads like a glimpse into a large linguistic model from the Wylie Independent School District in Collin County, Texas, where the singing superintendent was once employed, boasting of his “strong academics” and “wide range of extracurricular activities.” One of the top comments reads: “Gem alarm! » which suggests that the passers-by found gold in their daily scroll.

The skit is just one example of a new trend of AI video memes on Instagram and TikTok that students have invented to mock school teachers and sometimes attack their reputations, apparently for the sake of virality. These largely student-run accounts have earned the nickname “smear pages” online. It’s a digital twist on the average high school prank, but with potentially much higher stakes.

Posts on the “smear page” use slang terms from unsavory parts of the Internet. The lingo “Looksmaxxing,” originating from manosphere forums that teach men how to be more attractive, is commonly used in these memes, including words like “mog,” which means to dominate another man with one’s appearance, and “sub5,” which was coined to refer to people of subhuman ugliness.

Some “defamatory” videos use the AI ​​image-video tool Viggle AI, which gives creators the ability to insert any photographed person into any reference video, as well as animate a static image in a lip-sync video format. Viggle AI has been described as “a new frontier in the creation of spontaneous extremist propaganda” by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, an academic research arm of King’s College London, in a recent blog post. The platform has more than 40 million users as of February. Viggle AI did not respond to a request for comment.

In a since-deleted “slander” video using Viggle AI and posted to TikTok, a teacher’s face was superimposed on that of a person shaking in a bathroom. The overlaid text caption read, “Take fentan or be useless,” calling the seizure a fentanyl high.

The posters behind these pages also use morphed extremist symbols. For example, some teachers are admitted to the fictional world of Agartha, which is a key setting of neo-Nazi occultism where everyone is white and blond. Professors in the montage are shown with glowing white eyes to indicate that they are allowed into Agartha or with red eyes to show that they are refused.

In the case of Crandall High School in Crandall, Texas, the situation became even more extreme. Memes from a viral TikTok account called @crandall.kirkinator broke the lockdown of Crandall’s local user base, inspiring TikTokers with hundreds of thousands of followers — and no discernible connection to the school — to amplify the “slander” against Crandall teachers. Viral video skits have even featured scenarios in which administrators berate students for posting these messages.

Crandall High School administrators declined to comment on the situation, but in late January, all content from the @crandall.kirkinator TikTok account was deleted and replaced with a statement acknowledging that the corresponding Instagram account had been deleted. “My Instagram account was not banned, it was deleted voluntarily by me… Some teachers have been harassed, called for spam or emailed by random people, which was never my intention… The account was created as a joke and was never intended to escalate until now,” the statement read. A few days after posting the statement, the account began posting on TikTok again. Last week it was removed entirely.