Last month, a detective in a small town outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, invited dozens of high school girls and their parents to the police station to undertake a difficult task: one by one, the girls were asked to confirm that they were depicted in hundreds of AI-generated deepfake pornographic images seized by law enforcement.
In a series of back-to-back private meetings, Detective Laurel Bair of the Susquehanna Regional Police Department slid each image out from under the folder’s cover, so only the girl’s face was shown, unless the families specifically requested to see the entire uncensored image.
“It made me a lot more upset after I saw the pictures because it made them so much more real for me,” one Lancaster victim, now 16, told Forbes. “They’re very graphic and they’re very realistic,” the mother said. “There’s no way someone who didn’t know her wouldn’t think: ‘that’s her naked,’ and that’s the scary part.” There were more than 30 images of her daughter.
The photos were part of a cache of images allegedly taken from 60 girls’ public social media accounts by two teenage boys, who then created 347 AI-generated deepfake pornographic images and videos, according to the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office. The two boys have now been criminally charged with 59 counts of “sexual abuse of children,” and 59 counts of “posession of child pornography,” among other charges, including “possession of obscene materials depicting a minor.”
Forty-eight of the 60 victims were their classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, a small private school approximately 80 miles west of Philadelphia. The school is so small that nearly half of the high school’s female students were victimized in the images and videos. The scale of the underage victims makes this the largest-known instance of deepfake pornography made of minors in the United States.
“The number of victims involved in this case is troubling, and the trauma that they have endured in learning that their privacy has been violated in this manner is unimaginable,” Heather Adams, the district attorney, said in the statement.
According to a statement released last week by the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office, all but one of the victims were under 18 at the time. Authorities do not believe that the images were publicly posted online, but were rather distributed within the school community on text threads and similar messaging platforms.
As the two defendants are minors, prosecutors declined to release any further information about them. The suspects’ parents did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment.
This incident is not the first such criminal deepfake porn prosecution involving suspects who are under 18. Earlier this year, two Miami middle school students were arrested and charged under similar circumstances.
Experts say that it is rare for criminal charges to be brought in deepfake pornography cases where both the victims and the perpetrators are minors.
“My guess [as to why there aren’t more such prosecutions] is just that there may be a general recognition that arresting children isn’t going to resolve this,” Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence who has long studied the intersection of child sexual abuse material and AI, told Forbes.
In a similar deepfake porn case at a school in New Jersey, no charges were brought, and the alleged perpetrator does not appear to have suffered any academic or legal penalties. Dorotha Mani, a mother of one of the New Jersey victims, outlined her frustration with the leadership at her daughter’s school in approximately three pages of written testimony to Congress published in March. In that document, she called Westfield High School’s tepid response as “not only disheartening but also dangerous, as it fosters an environment where female students are left to feel victimized while male students escape necessary accountability.”
According to local media reports, Lancaster Country Day School administrators were first notified of the existence of the deepfake images late last year, but parents and victims did not find out until earlier this year when a second allegation of deepfake porn was filed with school officials. In early November, students walked out to protest what they viewed as the school’s failure to investigate the scope and scale of the AI-generated media. Numerous parents have now also sued the school, alleging that it failed to act when it was required to and that it failed to adequately protect its students.
In a statement emailed to Forbes, the school’s board of trustees said on Monday that it takes “this responsibility and this current matter very seriously,” adding that the school has cooperated with law enforcement.
“It is not appropriate for us to comment on the specific charges brought against the two individuals by the authorities, and it is not our practice to publicly discuss information about former students,” the board said.
“What we can say is that caring for our community, supporting those who have been impacted by this upsetting situation, and reviewing the school’s policies about student safety remain our school’s highest priorities right now.”
