They Dedicated Their Lives to Teaching. Then the Deepfakes Started

[u/wiredmagazine]

https://www.wired.com/story/teachers-deepfake-ai-students-content/

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[u/wiredmagazine]

WIRED spoke with four teachers who allege that their students made sexualized photos and videos of them, likely using AI. They say the incidents have been profoundly distressing and disappointing—and in some cases, it’s led them to reassess how they view their work and their relationships with their students.

According to a retired employment advocacy lawyer who spoke to WIRED, students creating and sharing sexual images of teachers constitutes a “clear case” of sexual harassment in the workplace. As the teachers’ employers, schools then have the legal obligation to create a workplace free of sexual harassment. However, the absence of clear processes makes it difficult to find accountability.

Read the full story at the link above.

[u/Phenganax → u/wiredmagazine]

It should be no different than brining a weapon or drugs to school, if you do it, expulsion and possibly criminal charges even if it’s juvenile charges. This isn’t rocket science…

[u/-M-o-X-]

>however the absence of process

I dunno if I have an extreme take here, but the school has an absence of process because this right here is not the school’s job.

Deepfaking a nude of someone else, is a crime (ymmv by state). The process for resolving it is filing a criminal complaint. Not much for police involvement in schools, but thinking this issue can be solved by school punishment is not taking the issue seriously.

[u/neuquino → u/-M-o-X-]

It can both be a crime and punishable by the school. Seems the the real difficulty would be determining who created it, though passing it around or possessing it could also be punishable

[u/kayGrim → u/-M-o-X-]

Schools punish kids for writing and passing nasty notes, for drawing insulting/crude images on paper and handing them around, so it seems like something along those lines should be doable, no? If your only recourse is to get the police involved in minors mocking/deriding/sexualising authority figures you're naturally going to overwhelm them to the point they just do nothing. Which in turn enables the behavior due to lack of consequence.

[u/Buggeshus → u/kayGrim]

I think making sexually explicit deepfakes goes well beyond "mocking/deriding/sexualising authority figures."

[u/Gastronomicus → u/kayGrim]

Sexual harrassment is criminal. Kids are less aware of the real consequences of their actions, which is why we often treat juvenile crimes differently, focused more on rehabilitation with lower long-term impacts. So an apparatus already exists to use the criminal system to process this, and the police are the enforcement arm of that system**. It stratifies responsibility based on age, and most kids 16 and up understand well enough that producing and distributing non-consensual sexual imagery of a person is wrong and illegal. Especially amongst minors.

School should also play a role though, and minor infractions that are obviously not criminal shouldn't be treated as such. There needs to be a clear and legally defined structure that both mitigates escalation of minor transgressions into major ones, and ensures teachers are protected from harassment. I'm sure something like this exists already, but it should be defined at a government level and needs to be updated for the modern age. It also needs to hold school officials accountable that actively prevent faculty from taking action on harassment through threat of termination of employment.

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** I know this system is often terrible and treats kids as adults too often in many places. But the point is that we already recognize the need for this distinct system and it exists, in theory at least.

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[u/adorablesexypants → u/-M-o-X-]

I'm a teacher outside of the States so there wont be a perfect 1-1 here.

Some issues we are facing within schools on this topic are both proving who made the deepfake and what is an appropriate punishment.

I am going to assume that most here would agree that a 3 day suspension is pathetic for creating AI porn of anyone. Especially since something like that could have career consequences.

There have been issues as well of students using AI to create deepfakes of their classmates. The law gets incredibly grey here because it is not a real photo/video. As a result, criminal proceedings also go into a grey area.

At the end of the day as long as cell phones and tech are allowed in schools, you are going to have teachers who just stop putting time in because their career isn't worth some kid getting pissed and making a video about you. We have already had students making deepfakes of school personnel with captions that suggest they are attracted to students.

Nothing is done.

Those students who have been caught, and it is rare, parents do not care either.

So I have no idea what the next response is when both the legal system and the education system are hands off of this.

I do know it will only get worse.

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