A 13-year-old girl at a Louisiana middle school got into a fight with classmates who were sharing AI-generated nude images of her
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting 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 whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
I hear you, but what could the school have actually done to prevent this, realistically? Only way I could see is if smartphones etc. were all confiscated the moment kids step on the school bus (which is where this happened, for anyone not aware, it wasn’t in a classroom), and only returned when they’re headed home, and while it probably would be beneficial overall for kids to not have these devices in school, I don’t think that’s realistically possible in the present day.
And even still, it’d be trivial for the kid to both generate the images and share them with his buddies, after school. I don’t think the school can really be fairly blamed for the deepfake part of this. For not acting more decisively after the fact, sure.
That’s not a question for me to answer. It is, in fact, the school faculty’s duty to educate our school children as well as protect them. It is up to them to determine how to do that. It is also true that they failed her in this instance. There are preventative measures that schools can take to stop bullying both on campus and online. Every time a student is bullied into taking their own drastic measures has been failed by the system. In this case, doubly so as on top of her being bullied into retaliation, she was punished by the system for being failed by the system.